


Let's Go in the Garden

by MadameReveuse



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Peter, Complicated Relationships, Feelings Realization, M/M, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, eventual everyone/everyone - Freeform, post-LS canon divergence, so bear with me here. what if David Mellenby was very much alive
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-02-23 02:01:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 42,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23003965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadameReveuse/pseuds/MadameReveuse
Summary: Investigating a series of mysterious disappearances, Team Folly uncovers a bit of past thought to be long-buried.
Relationships: Beverley Brook/Peter Grant, David Mellenby/Thomas Nightingale
Comments: 28
Kudos: 93





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Previously posted on my tumblr (weepylucifer), here it is now, David Mellenby Lives AU on ao3 for the sake of convenience. Do you like angst, complicated feelings, war flashbacks, and Peter Grant narrating a colliding gay trainwreck? Then this is for you.
> 
> 12 chapters of this exist on tumblr, and will be uploaded here whenever I have the time. I'm planning on restructuring and editing a bit, which might take me some hot minutes, but I'll try to be reasonable wrt update schedule.
> 
> Kudos and feedback welcome. Enjoy !!!

_Let's go in the garden,_

_You'll find something waiting,_

_Right there where you left it,_

_Lying upside down_

_When you finally find it_

_You'll see how it's faded,_

_The underside is lighter_

_When you turn it around_

“Aed,” said the fae. “Please, you may call me Aed.”

It was, that much I knew from what had stuck during my leafing through the Folly’s mundane library, one of the lesser known faerie aliases, like Aisling or Myself or Nobody, something for a fae to use in a pinch, and certainly not likely to be this guy’s actual name. But it had been what he’d responded to my inquiry after his legal name - fine, _A_ legal name for our files.

Aed looked like David Bowie and Kurt Cobain had had a lovechild, whom they then abandoned to be raised by a family of raccoons.

He was tall, pale, skinny and he gangled, and everything about him looked… dejected, is what I’m trying to bring across here. Fae have often been observed to dress according to their chosen vocation, or so one of the ancient wizards said who used to record his observations on the demi-monde within the Folly’s records. I’ve certainly also seen this here and there, like Molly’s Edwardian maid dress or Foxglove’s artist getup. This guy seemed like he was trying to play up a role of… hermit, or dumpster-diver.

Aed’s story was this: once upon a time, in some vague past, his… Nightingale says ‘tribe’, I would opt for ‘community’… of fae had had some neighbourly dispute with another one. Before they knew it, dispute became war, there had been a vicious attack, and Aed’s people had been scattered. Far as he knew, he might be the last one standing. Now, unwilling to pass back into the realm in which his type of fae actually dwelt for fear of what might await him there, Aed subsisted in a… it cannot be said any more politely, in a dank cave out on Dartmoor, far from any kind of civilisation save for a few scattered villages around and about. They barely counted, for my part; most of them could barely boast one decent pub.

Sometimes, occasionally, people from these adjoining towns would stumble upon Aed’s dwelling. Purely by accident, you understand, it wasn’t like he was luring anyone out here, or at least so he claimed. Most people he could simply cause to forget. They would head home and not bother him out here again. But sometimes, people came to him with a wish to make. A bargain to offer. Troubled people, he said. People who, like him, longed for escape. A quiet place, to hide from something, just to get away from it all, and bliss. Oblivion. Respite.

I looked into that gaunt face framed by sad, stringy hair, those long, bony fingers fiddling nervously with the strings of his moss-green hoodie, and understood that Aed actually had thought he was helping. And the disappearances had been too few and far between as to ever rouse the suspicion of the Folly, or much of anyone for that matter. But then, about a week ago, a girl named Lucinda Blaine had gone missing and, what with her being the great-granddaughter of a bloke remotely connected to Hugh Oswald’s gossip mill, we’d gotten a call on the Folly’s ancient landline. Even ancient retired practitioners keep their eyes open, apparently, and people disappearing plus a relatively recently circulated local fairy myth about the area had warranted a call to us. So we’d headed out here because, well, obligation, missing children, all that jazz. This time Nightingale had tagged along, possibly because he too felt an obligation towards one of his centenarian cohorts and, by extension, their families. Apparently, just after the war, he’d been asked to stand godfather to the spawn of about anyone who’d made it back to England and gotten it in their heads to start procreating. There had been guys trying to name their sons after him. These days, all the hype seemed to have died down: we didn’t often get veterans calling the Folly, and if Nightingale was otherwise in contact with any of them, I’d never noticed, and I got the feeling he preferred this.

“But she approached me with a wish,” Aed was now saying. I was taking his statement right there in the cave, seeing as he couldn’t be persuaded to leave it, and abandon his sleeping charges. “She told me her situation had become untenable. That she longed to escape the torments of her life.”

“Well, she’s eight,” I replied, maybe a bit more sharply than was strictly appropriate. “Eight-year-olds try to run away from home sometimes. Doesn’t mean adults should enable that. Yeah, her parents getting a divorce is causing her a lot of grief right now, but she’ll get better eventually. It for sure doesn’t warrant putting her into a magical sleep forever.”

I looked around the cave. Lucinda was nowhere near the only person asleep here, although we had been quick to find her. The other people resting here in their magical stasis were adults, thank god for small mercies. There were green vines everywhere, making up beds for the sleepers, growing under and above and beyond them; the ones that had evidently been here the longest were all but covered in vegetation. But they were all breathing, and none of them looked worse for wear.

“People have to go and confront their problems,” I said. “What do you think sleeping it off is going to solve? Will they really be happier when they wake up and it’s a hundred years later?”

Aed looked at me, saddened and confused. Here was a guy who had been out here on his own for too long, I thought. He had lived here in his own little world, where making people disappear was justified and good, and now he suddenly had wizards in his home demanding he stop. “Their problem would be gone,” he said softly.

“They’d have other, bigger problems instead.” I shook my head. Sometime soon, we’d have to wake up all these people and get them out of here, preferably into medical care; they would be in shock and needing to be looked at. I had no idea how the folks over in the town would cope with having everyone who disappeared here within the last couple years back at once. Mostly, though, right this moment, I was worried about getting Aed to part with his charges. He didn’t look like he had a lot of fight in him, but with the demi-monde you never know. 

It was then that Nightingale tapped me on the shoulder. “Perhaps I should like to have a word with Aed here, outside,” he said. “In the meantime, you’d better start reviving the victims. Getting these plants off of them should do the trick, but try not to have them touch your skin. And see if you can call anybody at the local force, these people are going to be needing medical attention.” Then he gently, but firmly put a hand on Aed’s shoulder and steered him towards the mouth of the cave.

“Now,” I heard him say, “let me tell you, one survivor to another…”

I tried not to strain my ears to listen to what they were discussing. I had work to do, anyway. Through some minor miracle, I had a signal up here, so I called down at the station in one of those arse-end-of-the-world towns and got told that while it would be nigh-impossible to get an ambulance out here, there would at the very least be a team of first responders along soonish. I sighed to myself, already impatient to return to London and civilisation, but there was a job to do first. I put on gloves and started to unravel all the vines.

Nightingale proved to have been right, people began waking up as soon as I got the flora off them. They were fairly out of it, most of them confused, somewhat frightened, especially the eight-year-old. Apparently most of them had not come out here for a bargain with the faerie expecting to be laid to sleep in a cave. I questioned them - gently, you see. There was a group of twenty-somethings here who’d wanted to celebrate some pagan ritual (completely made up). There were some other folks who’d simply angled for a meditative moment, to honor a little local custom, to leave a wish for the faerie, expecting… well, nothing much. After all, the Good Gentlemen of the Hills weren’t _real_ , right - until they were. Some of these people had indeed been here for years. I had my hands full, and the situation was coming precariously close to slipping from me when the first-response-team showed up, dispensing shock blankets and gently corralling everyone to where they’d parked the ambulance.

Just about then, Nightingale came back. He wasn’t terribly wordy, said he had been able to persuade Aed to return home at last, to finally check on his people. I wanted to ask what he said to him but didn’t, a slight bit afraid that he’d had to make threats of some sort or worse, give Aed the Condensed Ettersberg. I imagine _suspecting_ you’re the last one of your people and _knowing_ it makes a bit of a difference, and according to Nightingale, last anyone from the Folly had checked, some of Aed’s tribe had still been extant, so who knows. Maybe there was hope for that guy yet.

“You missed another one back here,” Nightingale said at last, striding deeper into the cave.

There was what remained of Aed’s camp here, a sleeping bag and futon, a portable stovetop, a few bags with odds and ends. Depressing. There was, indeed, also another buried sleeper.

The vines were thickest towards the back of the cave, a verdant green affair that didn’t look quite… real, almost stylized, like vines in a video game rather than real life plants. They were almost as thick as a man’s forearm, and the shape of the last person trapped here was suggested rather than seen. I had trouble pulling them off without potentially injuring the sleeper, so Nightingale said, “Allow me,” and disintegrated them using some at-least-fifth-order spell. I had half an eye on the other sleepers who were all slowly coming to, so I left him to it until he called my name.

“Peter,” he said, and there was a sudden tension to his voice that worried me, “I’m afraid we have another problem.”

He had unearthed the whole man - I have to assume - by now, and was looking at him with a hard-to-read expression. There was almost some disdain in it, certainly a load of dismay. 

“Sir?” I asked.

“This is another sort of glamour here, some _seducere_ variant,” he explained, “or another fae. It cannot possibly be what it looks like.”

This surprised me, seeing as I wasn’t feeling anything at all weird - no _vestigia_ , nothing. By the looks of it, this was another ordinary bloke sleeping here, another result of a dodgy deal with the fae. But I decided to defer to Nightingale’s expertise. “How so?” I asked.

“For the sake of convenience,” Nightingale said, “Could you please describe to me what you are seeing here?” He gestured at the sleeping man and there was some undercurrent of something in his voice, something badly repressed there, and my concern and confusion mounted. Still, I obliged.

“I’m seeing an IC-1 male, early or mid-fourties by the looks of him,” I started my description. “Dark hair, sort of unkempt, sort of a gaunt look to him. He has a mole or birthmark on his neck, here.” I tapped my own thoat in the corresponding place. “He is wearing what appears to be hiking gear, pretty old, I mean, old-fashioned but well-maintained. He must’ve been laid up here for quite some time. Boots, like army boots, like the pair you have. Grey canvas jacket, or maybe it’s khaki.” Hard to tell in this light. 

If anything, my description seemed to surprise Nightingale even more. “Yes, that is… that seems to correspond with what I’m getting.” He shook his head. “I was expecting for you to be seeing… something else.”

“Like what?” I don’t get impatient with my governor often, but I have to admit I was starting to hate how tongue-tied he was being. 

“Probably a woman,” he said cryptically. “Anyway, this cannot be what it appears to be, seeing as I know this person, and he’s been dead for quite awhile.” 

Ah. Well, shit. And here I’d been so glad already that this situation had gone over without any violent mess. I wanted to ask Nightingale who it was, but he beat me to it before I could so much as open my mouth. 

“Right,” he said. “Let’s get it over with. Stand back, I’ll try to wake him.”

Before I could think to argue, or even make up my mind about what alternative action to argue for, Nightingale gripped his staff tightly, got down on one knee and used his free hand to shake the sleeper by the shoulder.

The man was slower to rouse than any of the others we’d found; he murmured something, a hand coming up to swat in the vague direction of Nightingale’s, but after a minute, his heavy eyelids fluttered open.

Voice thick with sleep, the stranger slurred, “Thomas?”

Nightingale straightened, took two steps back and huffed out through his nose. “Don’t even attempt it.”

The stranger blinked, evidently confused, and then, with surprising speed, he lunged to his feet. I admit I flinched. 

The stranger’s legs were trembling, he was shaky with the effort of keeping himself upright after laying prone here for god knows how long. Hair fell into his eyes as he leveled a wild-eyed gaze at Nightingale.

“Get away!” he shouted, his voice hoarse. “You’re that fae again. You’re a shape-changer, aren’t you? How dare you appear to me like this?”

Nightingale raised an eyebrow. “I should be asking you these questions.”

“You’re not Thomas. Thomas fell at Ettersberg.”

 _“What?”_ Nightingale crossed his arms; it was almost funny how _indignant_ he sounded. “No, it’s _you_ who died as a result of Ettersberg.”

Jesus Christ, I thought, Ettersberg again. It’s always fucking Ettersberg, isn’t it? Unbelievable, really, how much my life was being affected by a place I’d never been to and had no desire to visit.

“Nonsense,” the stranger ground out harshly. “We… we had no word, there was, there was no way anyone on the ground got out.”

Nightingale was drumming his fingers against the tip of his cane, as much proof of his pique as I’d ever seen him exhibit. “And yet here I am.”

“That’s… no. You’re _not_ Thomas.”

“It is you who isn’t what you profess to be.” I was seeing just how tired Nightingale was growing of this back and forth. Whoever, whatever this was pretending to be one of his old war buddies, it had him careening towards the end of his tether.

“I am exactly what I profess to be,” the stranger claimed. He took a deep breath. “In 1930, in November, I was visiting you while you were staying at the consulate in Lahore. We sat in the Vicereine's gardens, under the stars, and you said to me that you wouldn’t mind if–”

Nightingale cut him off with a sharp wave of his hand. “You could easily pluck that from my memories.”

I had been watching the exchange, I must admit, with my mouth slightly agape. Now I saw an opportune moment to cut in. “Sir,” I said. “He claims to be someone from the old Folly, right?”

“That’s right,” Nightingale replied at the same time as the stranger asked, “Who’s that?” like he was just now noticing me for the first time.

“My apprentice,” Nightingale introduced me. “Whatever you have to say to me can be said in front of him.”

I found that a little bit of an odd thing to say in the moment, but I was also flattered at the show of trust.

“An apprentice?” The stranger snorted. “Yeah, bullshit. _My_ Thomas doesn’t have an apprentice, and no desire to take one either.”

I ignored him for the time being. “Sir, as for proving his identity, one way or the other,” I suggested, “could you recognize his _signare_? Is it possible to fake that?”

Nightingale looked at me in the way he does when I hit on something he hasn’t considered before. “Not that I know of.” He beckoned towards the stranger and demanded, in one of his rare militaristic tones, “Right. Werelight, please.”

“You too,” the stranger said through clenched teeth.

“While we’re at it,” Nightingale said with a nod and they both held their palms out, and conjured a werelight each.

Now, I’d like to say I’m familiar enough with Nightingale’s _signare_ from all this time spent around him watching him work his magic. The stranger’s was entirely new: like a gust of fresh air through a recently opened window (I thought I could even feel a hint of the curtains blowing in the sudden breeze, white and starched), a hand skimming over cool tiles, the sound of something bubbling in a beaker, and a hint of pine that weirdly seemed to correspond with a component of Nightingale’s own _signare_ , like two pieces of something coming together. 

The stranger gaped. “It’s really you. You’re really here, you… you _found_ me.”

I glanced from him to Nightingale, who seemed to have frozen solid. His staff clattered loudly as it hit the ground. And I swear, I have never ever seen this purely indescribable look on my guv'nor's face.

_“David.”_


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Team Folly - with one exciting addition! - heads back to London.

“Hi, Thomas.”

I kind of stared. _David_ is a common name, but somehow I knew exactly which one this was. I knew approximately two things about David Mellenby with a certainty: he’d been very into science, and he was definitely dead. No wonder Nightingale was suspicious. Apart from that… not much. Nightingale had brought him up maybe twice.

“This isn’t possible.” I barely recognized this as Nightingale’s voice, but it was coming out of his mouth, so what else could it be? “You’re… dead, they told me, Hugh Oswald found your body. It about gave his nerves the rest.”

The stranger - David, apparently - twisted his mouth into a discomfited frown. “Hugh Oswald found... _a_ body. I’m so sorry.”

“But how…” Nightingale shook his head. He looked as if a train had hit him, and it was a disquieting sight. I was used to Nightingale in control, see, I was used to him being the guy who, well, might not always know right away what to do, but will reliably find out. “What are you doing _here?”_

“I left… I ran. I had to get away. It got… too much, being in the Folly, with that damnable library there. I don’t know, I barely knew what I was doing. I just wanted to disappear. I had no idea you’d made it out of Ettersberg, Thomas, I would never let you believe I was dead. You must know that. I ran into this fae out here and… I’m not sure what happened then, but I must have talked myself into a right mess.” Mellenby tried for a smile. “But it can’t have been too long, can it? You look good. Did you just get home? You seem to have recovered rather splendidly. Are you… are we alright?”

Nightingale seemed to unfreeze at that. He stepped forward, and then, with unfailing precision, he punched Mellenby in the nose.

Mellenby, still unsteady on his feet, reeled back, stumbled and landed flat on his arse clutching his bloody nose. “Thomas! What on earth–”

“You…” Nightingale was breathing heavily. “You were here the whole time, alive, you _ran away,_ is what you’re telling me? How could you do this to Oswald? How could you do this to me!”

I was seriously starting to worry for everyone’s continued safety here. Nightingale stood rooted to the spot, trembling fists white-knuckled at his sides and let’s be frank, he’s not a guy who hauls off and punches people. I’d thought I’d known what anger looked like on him but boy, did I have no idea. I’d seen him more controlled while actively in a fight with Chorley.

Mellenby stared up at him, his eyes wide. “My songbird…”

“No. You don’t get to… no. I’ve been alone with it all for - eighty years have passed, David!”

There was a dreadful little silence in which Mellenby just blinked. “I… are you saying I slept for eighteen years?”

“Eigh _ty_ ,” I piped up. The both of them turned towards me as if only just remembering I was there.

“Peter.” Nightingale’s voice was leaden. “Hand me my staff, will you? I seem to have dropped it.”

“Sir, may I suggest not doing anything you might regret,” I posited, because ‘my songbird’ was still kind of echoing, if not in the cave then certainly in my mind. I was closest to where his staff had rolled off to, so I did pick it up, but made no move to hand it over.

“Allow me to judge this for myself,” Nightingale said through clenched teeth. He beckoned in my direction without looking at me, his eyes still boring holes into David. “And give me my staff.”

I didn’t know if he wanted to use it for its intended purpose or just as a blunt object, but I couldn’t in good conscience enable either. “Sir, I don’t think–”

“I shan’t repeat myself.”

“Thomas, please, you know I love your little pranks, but this is not the time–” Mellenby started to say, but Nightingale waved his hand in the sharp downward motion that accompanied his more theatrical spells, and Mellenby’s mouth clicked shut.

He stared up at Nightingale in complete disbelief, eyes wide and shining with the onset of tears, unable to get his mouth open. I had seen this once before, and yet again I felt the vast and smooth click-clicking of Nightingale’s magic at work. But it felt different than the usual, disordered, the myriad little gears grinding.

“Sir,” I said, more sharply than I perhaps had intended. Nightingale finally turned to look at me, and slowly, gradually, he slipped back into the 21st century, where we have rules against using our magic on people in anger.

Mellenby crumpled to the floor when he was released from the spell, his head lowered, eyes leaking, cheeks glowing from the strain of trying to open his mouth earlier, some blood still smeared below his nose. Nightingale looked from me to him to me again.

“My apologies,” he said stiffly, to the room in general, and strode for the exit.

* * *

“Was he serious?” Mellenby asked me later. “Eighty years?”

“Around about,” I said. "More like seventy-five, really."

We were sitting up front of Aed’s cave, parked here for now while Nightingale was further down the slope towards the road, bossing the paramedics around. Of course that situation was very much ongoing, and someone had to get it under wraps, I had just naturally expected that to be me. I had offered to go into town and see everything squared away, give them some privacy to reunite in whichever… way they saw fit, but Nightingale had shot that down.

“I would rather not be left alone with him right now,” he’d said, tension radiating off of him. He hadn’t even asked for his staff again, so I just laid it across my lap as I sat.

I regarded David Mellenby with curiosity. I still knew very little about him: the scientist, dead no longer, and now a person who called my boss ‘songbird’ and seemed accustomed enough to getting away with it. He was watching the paramedics. The moor was pretty timeless in and of itself and had probably looked about the same in the 1940s, but the ambulances and the uniforms of the paramedics had to be, to him, a shrill discord.

“But he still looks the same,” Mellenby said, with the air of a man trying to wrap his mind around it all. 

“Long story.”

He turned to look at me. He had large, clear eyes, not really the kind you expect on your classic mad scientist archetype. “Do tell?”

“He got old, and then younger again at some point. Or so I hear, I wasn’t actually around to see it then. Now he seems to be… stuck in his 40s. Not aging in either direction. It’s one of these mysteries.”

“So he’s about the same age he was when I last saw him,” Mellenby said, his curiosity evidently piqued. I had known this guy for all of five minutes, and I could already see the gears starting to turn behind his eyes. “Has anyone found out what caused it?”

I shrugged. In truth, I hadn’t asked myself this for a while now, my magical unaging guv’nor having become just another part of daily life, something I had long ago begun taking for granted. There’s a lesson in there about growing complicit, or something. “No, come to think of it,” I said. “Our cryptopathologist is trying to puzzle it out in his spare time, but honestly I don’t think Nightingale’s that bothered. I asked once and he just gave me the line about gift horses.”

Mellenby laughed, a sudden, high, loud sound that surprised me. Down the slope, I thought I could see Nightingale’s head turning at the noise. “Oh, of course,” Mellenby said. “Of course he hasn’t thought about it at all. That’s so _Thomas_.”

He continued laughing, way longer than the moment warranted, hunched over and his shoulders shaking, and soon there were tears dripping down his chin. He put a hand over his eyes, the other over his mouth, but nothing could contain the outpouring. “Take life as it comes and no need to examine anything, that’s Thomas. Oh, I thought I’d never see him again,” he sniffled, chuckling, sobbing, all at once. “I thought I’d left him there. Oh god, I thought I’d _left_ him there.”

I shifted a little where I sat, not sure if I should touch his shoulder, or say something to him, or what I could even say. The slightly mad laughter subsided after a minute or so, but he was still weeping a bit when Nightingale eventually made his way back to us. 

“Back to London, I should think,” he said and I got up, brushing some dirt off my pants as I did so, already relieved at the prospect of returning home. I suddenly couldn’t wait to see Bev tonight.

Nightingale shot a brief look at Mellenby, tossed him a handkerchief and off we went on the long trudge to where the Jag was parked.

* * *

It was funny, really, Mellenby’s reaction to the Jag. Similar to mine, back when, but coming at it from the other side. To me, the Jag had been (and was still) remarkable as an old-timer. To Mellenby, it was a futuristic sci-fi car.

“It’s from the 1960s,” I explained, because Nightingale was still giving us the near-silent treatment, but I did manage to catch a glimpse of him smoothing a hand across the side of the Jag in furtive appreciation, maybe secretly proud that his car impressed his… well, what? Comrade-at-arms? Best pal? Boyfriend? Ex?

 _Nineteen-sixty,_ Mellenby mouthed quietly, eyes wide and round. “And, um, what year is it now?”

I grinned and imagined him reacting to the Ferrari in a couple hours or so.

* * *

Suffice to say I had many questions for the both of them still, but the drive home didn’t seem to be the time for asking them. For a while, we had little traffic, and Nightingale utilized this opportunity to drive even more maniacally than usual. I swear, an open highway seems to unhinge something within him. I, having called shotgun to preserve the peace, was used to his speeding by now, but Mellenby in the backseat was, when I checked, looking paler by the minute. When he wasn’t holding on to the door-handle for dear life, he was staring, incredulous, out of the window, gawping at the brave new world.

We didn’t talk much. After 30 minutes it started to feel like somebody had cast a silence spell of some sort, like the silence was a physical entity growing larger and larger in the car between us, suffocating all attempts at conversation and about as solid as a block of cement.

We stopped at a gas station about halfway back to London. “Does anyone want anything from the shop?” Nightingale asked, the first words spoken since we’d started driving.

The proverbial spell had broken. “I’ve just woken up and found that near a century has passed in my absence,” Mellenby said, somewhat heatedly. “The cars, the people, even the bloody roads are unrecognizable to me. You punched me, and you used your magic on me like I’m some blasted Jerry, and you drive like an insane person, and now you’re asking me if I want anything from the shop?”

“I’d like a Snickers,” I said.

“Alright, one Snickers bar and that whole thing,” Nightingale said dryly. Without acknowledging us any further, he went off to get gas.

It’s a weird kind of atmosphere, sitting in a parked car with someone you don’t know. But there also was this strange air of ‘dad’s away, now we can gossip’. That one was probably just me, but I decided to carpe the diem.

“Jerry?” I asked.

“The Germans,” Mellenby said darkly.

We were silent for another minute.

“Thomas got even better, didn’t he?” Mellenby said then. “That was a tenth-order spell at least back there, and he executed it with ease. He didn’t even have his staff. This is highly fascinating.” He seemed like he’d pull out a clipboard any second now and start scribbling observation notes. But then he met my eyes and gave me a crooked smile, and his eyes were shining wetly again, and I realized he was trying to put a brave face on.

I nodded. “Yeah, it’s impressive.” I didn’t even try to mention how that spell was used on him, and how said spell, while undoubtedly impressive, kind of creeps me out on principle.

“Why is he so fucking pissed at you?” I asked.

“He has a variety of reasons, probably.” Mellenby gestured resignedly. “Towards the end of the war, several things… went awry between us.” And that was all he seemed to want to say about that.

“So you’re Thomas’s apprentice,” he now asked me, leaning forward in his seat. “How is that going?”

I didn’t really know what to do with that question, so I said something about it going okay, thank you. 

“And what sort of things has he been teaching you?” he asked.

This struck me as a bit odd. “Same stuff everyone used to learn, I guess,” I said. “Some _formae_ and a truckload of Latin.” 

“Greek?” Mellenby asked in an undertone.

“Not yet.” I shifted a bit. “Nightingale says I won’t need it that much, and to be honest, I’m still not doing as well with Latin as he’d like.” I suddenly felt that gross little prickle of self-consciousness about the state of my Latin. I do my level best, next to my day job, even when all the homework is frequently kind of dull, and by now I’m sure Nightingale knows that, and knows to exercise patience when necessary. But here was a denizen of the old Folly, who had started learning Latin at ten years old. Would he ask why I hadn’t? Would he make his own assumptions? _He’s not better than you,_ I told myself. And I knew that. Thing was just, it might have gotten a bit nasty in here if _he_ thought he was.

“I didn’t mean…” Now it was Mellenby’s turn to fidget. “What I meant to inquire was…”

Nightingale came back then and tossed me a snickers bar as requested, and so I didn’t get to find out what Mellenby meant to inquire until a while later. My attention was diverted from that, anyway, when I saw Nightingale attempting to stealthily pocket a small, square, red-and-white packet.

“I thought you said you stopped in the fifties,” I remarked.

“As you may have noticed, I’m having a bit of a day, Peter,” Nightingale said, perhaps a tad snippy, and, giving up all pretense of secrecy, just shook a cigarette out of the pack. 

“Light you,” Mellenby offered hurriedly, already thrusting a hand up into the driver’s space.

“Don’t you dare, I have my phone on.”

“What?”

I leaned back in my seat and tried not to stare too openly as Nightingale actually, genuinely lit a cigarette, in a completely mundane, non-magical way using a lighter he had to have also just purchased. ‘No smoking in the Jag’ was high up on the list of Golden Rules of Jag Etiquette, even as it had never been an issue before. One hell of a day indeed.

* * *

We were taking Mellenby back to the Folly. For the time being, Nightingale said, making it clear that this wasn’t happening because his heart was so inclined, but because apparently Mellenby’s story still needed examining. We were going to have Dr. Walid take a crack at him at the nearest opportunity and, because we don’t do anything by halves, we would also swing by the military cemetery where Mellenby was supposed to be buried, and see what we could rustle up there.

“So we’re going grave-robbing?” I asked, somewhat incredulously.

“Of course not, Peter, don’t be ridiculous,” Nightingale told me. “I will get in touch with the persons responsible and acquire a permit to open the grave.” 

Right. We _were_ still the police.

“Did you ever see the body?” I asked. Mellenby had implied earlier that he had faked his death, and that there had been a body for poor Hugh Oswald to find, so if his story checked out, something (someone?) had to have been buried in his place. Nightingale shook his head.

“I missed the funeral. I was still in hospital.” His mouth thinned into a repressive line. “Nobody thought to tell me at all until weeks afterwards.”

“Why would they not tell you that?” I asked.

“I wasn’t family, Peter.” Nightingale smiled sadly. “I was David’s superior officer, sure, and a personal friend, but, in the eyes of the world, never more than that. The… queer thing only stopped being a crime punishable by jail time twenty years later, mind you.” He looked at his hands folded in his lap and I realized that I’d just been subject to my boss coming out to me. Not that I hadn’t ever suspected, but it had never been put into words.

“Oh,” I said, “Okay,” I said, and it felt like the most inadequate statement in the world.

* * *

But first things first: Molly froze on the spot when we walked into the atrium with Mellenby. She just stared at him, and then stared at Nightingale, and then she hovered, a bewildered expression on her face.

“Ah, yes,” Nightingale said. “Molly, you will remember… David.”

“Hi, Molly,” David chirped. “It’s good to see you again!”

Molly looked from him back to Nightingale again as if wanting to say _explain this._ She raised her hand, index and middle finger extended, and put the fingers to her temple, very efficiently pantomiming the obvious question she had. I wondered if Molly had had to clean up the laboratory… after.

“Well,” Nightingale said, giving her a strained smile. “Apparently, no, he didn’t.”

“I’m sorry for giving you grief, Molly, Thomas.” Mellenby looked down at his feet, abashed. “I would’ve come back, you know. If I could’ve… if I’d known.”

“Oh, _would_ you have?” Nightingale asked, in that tone he reserved for statements such as “So Johnson _does_ rather believe that about women wearing veils?” or “Tyburn _did_ say that, didn’t she?”

Molly drew up to her whole height, an impressive thing to watch, and gave Mellenby a scathing glare before she brushed past him and off in the direction of the kitchen. 

“Oh dear,” Mellenby said, fighting to keep a wavering little smile up. “Now two people are mad at me.” He cleared his throat. “Ahem. Where’s everybody else?”

Nightingale gestured at the atrium, empty of anyone but us three. “This is everyone. Well, Abigail comes around once a week, but she’s not a full apprentice yet. Nobody else stayed active, and certainly nobody else started aging in reverse. It’s myself and Peter and Molly.”

I watched Mellenby work through that. How for a moment he looked lost, and small, and stricken, and then attempted to straighten his back and push the weight of that down. “And me, now,” he said. “I’ll return to duty. I’ll help in any way I can.” He tried to take Nightingale’s hand. Nightingale slapped it away, maybe a bit too forcefully.

“You will be doing nothing of the sort until I’ve corroborated your story,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I will be heading downstairs later and forge you a pair of inhibitor cuffs.”

David looked at him, still grief-stricken around the eyes. “You use inhibitor cuffs?” he asked. “But they are… a German invention.”

“You would know about German inventions,” Nightingale said, really almost hissed, and there was so much vitriol in it that I didn’t dare ask what that meant. In fact I got the hell out of dodge.

* * *

I went into the tech cave to check HOLMES for anything we might have missed while out of town. I didn’t turn up anything recent that looked like one of our cases, and I had no missed e-mails or calls except for a text from Bev asking if I would be home tonight. I replied in the affirmative and headed back to see where else the day might take me. 

I heard voices from the reading room and was about to open the door and announce my presence when I heard Mellenby say, “So, an apprentice, Thomas. Does he put out?”

 _Oh,_ I thought, at the same time as Nightingale replied, in the most incredulous voice I’d ever heard from him, “ _What?”_

There was a dagger in that word. _  
_

“Come now, he’s a handsome young man,” Mellenby said.

“And?” It only occurred to me much later that Nightingale hadn’t _denied_ it. _  
_

Mellenby sounded apologetic when he said, “One’s given to assume.” _  
_

“Well, don’t _,_ ” Nightingale said. “My relationship to Peter is a purely professional one, and also none of your concern. But while we’re on the subject, there’s something else I’d like to discuss.”

“Yes?” Mellenby asked.

I heard faint rustling, like someone shifting in their seat, and I could just imagine Nightingale sitting up straighter in the way he does that conveys ‘let’s get down to business’. “Many things have changed while you were away and Peter is, as you heard, my apprentice, with all rights, privileges and obligations that entails, and he has been my second-in-command here for the past four years. He’s not the help. If you are to stay here, I will see to it that you treat him with the respect you would have paid to any practitioner of the Folly. I especially don’t want to hear any comments with regard to his skin colour. There is also a plethora of words and phrases that were in usage back when you went off to have your somewhat lengthy nap which I will not hear used in Peter’s presence, or even in his absence.” _  
_

I knocked on the door and went in before Nightingale could start listing them. The two of them were seated in armchairs, across from each other and separated by the table between them, not close and certainly not touching.

“Hey, sir.” I ignored Mellenby, who wasn’t making a load of friends here. “I checked HOLMES, nothing new for us.” 

“Well, I’m sure something will be along,” Nightingale said in that wry way of his. “It does give us the whole afternoon to visit Abdul.”

I noted the _us_. “You want me to come?”

“Not necessarily.” Nightingale gestured Mellenby’s way. “I thought I’d just take David.”

“Right.” I nodded. As this had been a unit of two since the start, I was used to _we_ meaning Nightingale and I. That _we_ could also mean Nightingale and David now was… novel. For me. Not for either of them, probably. They might have done _we_ for a good long while, and were simply picking back up where they left off. 

When I left the room, I heard Mellenby say, “And you’re _sure_ you two are not making it?” and caught the beginning of Nightingale’s incensed negative before I decisively walked away from all of that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> David's just gonna cry for a few chapters. Sorry. He just woke up, his personality is taking a minute to get here. He's gonna be very dehydrated when I'm through with him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter wants validation, David wants his boyfriend and Nightingale probably just wants a drink at this point.

I felt weird just leaving that situation as it was and going off to Bev’s, but there didn’t seem to be anything else for me to do, and it was nearing evening, and I did confirm I was going to be there for dinner. Besides, if anything else weird happened, I was sure Molly could hold down the fort.

I told Beverley the whole story, and she was… well, she was entertained, I guess, but I could tell something was bothering her. I sat down with her on the couch, tucked her feet into my lap and started to rub her ankles - she didn’t deal with much in the way of morning sickness, and she wasn’t showing yet, but apparently her feet were swelling like mad and it drove her to distraction - but that didn’t seem to be it.

“There’s two of them now,” she said when I asked. “That’s weird. We only ever dealt with Nightingale, and he was the only one left, and it was okay, and you’re fine, but…”

“Hey, thanks,” I said.

“You know what I mean. You’re not _like_ the Nightingale, and you know I mean that as a compliment. But this other guy, his boyfriend or whatever… he’s going to be very Old Folly, isn’t he?”

I thought that over. I tried to remember what I’d been told about Mellenby before, the few scraps I’d gotten in passing from Nightingale and Hugh Oswald, and how that measured up against my first impression of him. It was inconclusive; there was just very little information. “Can’t tell yet.”

Beverley rested her head on my chest. “Ty won’t be too happy.”

I kept my thoughts on that to myself.

* * *

I was woken in the morning by my phone ringing. Bev turned over in bed with an annoyed grumble and swatted her hand in my direction in an entreaty to do something about the noise, so I picked it up. It was the Folly - not Nightingale, who had recently taken to actually using his cellphone for convenience’s sake, but the Folly’s landline. This got me slightly worried, so I answered it.

“Yeah?”

I was treated to complete silence on the other end. There wasn’t even the sound of breath, or if there was, it was very quiet.

My worry mounted, because why would anyone pick up the Folly’s ancient bakelite phone, dial my number and then stand there in silence? Who _did_ that sort of thing?

Then I tried, “Molly?”

There was a small scraping sound, like someone was tapping a fingernail against the receiver. 

“Molly, what’s up?”

Tap, tap. If she was trying to morse her concerns, she wasn’t doing a great job.

Beverley had woken up properly by now, and peeked out from under the blanket giving me a look of confusion.

“Do you want me to… should I come over?”

Tap, tap. Tap. It seemed to grow in urgency.

“What’s happening, have they burnt the house down?”

Scratch. Scratch. 

“I’ll be on my way… I guess.”

* * *

The Folly was still standing when I arrived there, but something was very much amiss. Foxglove was waiting for me by the back door, and she gave me a silent, deeply troubled look that boded ill as she gestured for me to go upstairs. I headed for the breakfast room - surely Molly would have prepared a whole spread, and I hadn’t eaten anything yet, and I reckoned I was sure to run into Nightingale there.

The tension in the room was so thick you could have cut it with a knife.

Mellenby’s eyes were red-rimmed, his face blotchy. Apart from that, he cleaned up pretty well, I noted: cleaned and parted at the side, his hair was curly, surprisingly so for a white guy. He was wearing a rather ancient dark blue suit that he’d probably left behind here before going off to war and all the rest; many rooms within the Folly had simply been sealed off with their former owners’ possessions all still inside, as if they might come back and use them again. That suit hung a little loosely on him; I suspected he’d lost weight in the war and never gained it back, having spent the last seventy-odd years in a magical stasis. He was tucking into his breakfast with good appetite, but sneaking furtive glances at Nightingale. Nightingale was staring resolutely in the opposite direction. Molly was serving them coffee in the most passive-aggressive manner I had ever seen her serve anything, and I’ve been on the receiving end of Molly’s ire a couple times.

 _It’s not my relationship drama,_ I decided. _No need to get involved._ I simply plonked myself down across from them and grabbed a piece of toast. “Morning.”

“Ah.” Nightingale looked up in a masterful imitation of someone just now noticing the other people in the room with them. “Good morning, Peter. You’re here early.”

“Couldn’t pass up Molly’s breakfast, sir.” Just then, Molly happened to swish by behind him, so I gave her a grin. She repaid me with an arched eyebrow and a perfectly normal cup of hot coffee for my trouble. It felt sort of nice to be the only one present on Molly’s good side for once, especially as Mellenby winced after one sip of _his_ coffee and even Nightingale frowned after trying it.

“Very mature, Molly,” he said. “What even did I do?”

Molly glared at him, and then towards the carpet covering most of the floor.

“Oh, really? Because I burnt one tiny hole into the Axminster? No one but us ever sees that rug.”

“Molly probably puts a lot of work into maintaining the carpets,” Mellenby said quietly. “Especially since there’s no other staff here now. Let’s try not to drag her into this.”

Nightingale picked up the Telegraph and rustled it pointedly. “Oh, _now_ he’s the gentleman.”

Mellenby’s eyes narrowed. “What are you implying, Thomas?”

“Can any of you pass the scrambled eggs?” I asked, still not getting involved. 

Their hands bumped together as they both tried to reach for the plate first. (I steadfastly refused to roll my eyes.) Mellenby’s cuff hiked up a bit and I could catch a glimpse at a kind of cast-iron wristlet he now wore. I’d seen this before on Varvara. Did this technology really come from the Nazis?

He must have seen me looking, because he fidgeted with it. “…Just wish you’d take this off me, is all,” he said sullenly.

“Not until the lab results are in.” Feigning perfect calm with only middling success, Nightingale picked up his pen and turned to the crossword. He took another sip of his coffee and for a second looked like he’d bitten on a lemon.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” I said, looking up from my eggs. “What _is_ Molly pissed about, sir?”

“It’s nothing,” Nightingale said. “Events… may have transpired and I might have dropped some ash off a cigarette and lightly singed the carpet in the reading room last night, is all.”

I risked a half-grin. “Events?”

He shot me a look communicating he had seen and interpreted my facial expression and just so’s I knew, he resented the implication.

“There was a… somewhat heated discussion,” Mellenby cut in. (Meaning they’d been fighting rather than fucking.)

“ _Heated_ is not quite the word I’d use,” Nightingale said.

“Not quite? Thomas, it’s a miracle your voice isn’t hoarse this morning.”

“Enough of that.” Nightingale tapped his pen against the newspaper - he still hadn’t gotten started on the crossword yet. “Peter, when you’re done I’d like you to head downstairs and get some practice in while we wait for Abdul to call.”

I nodded and hummed something affirmative around a mouthful of food. Across the table, Mellenby’s face lit up.

“Oh, may I be of assistance?” he asked. “I always wanted-”

“No.” Nightingale lowered the paper. “I would rather read your exhaustive treatise on quantum theory - or whatever it was called - again than permit you to interfere with Peter’s studies in any manner.”

There was a second of quiet as we all digested that statement. Even Molly, who had been about to leave the room with some of the empty plates, stopped and stood in apprehension of what was to come, her shoulders rigid and drawn up almost to her ears.

Then Mellenby muttered, “I thought you liked that study.”

At last, Nightingale began filling in his bloody crossword. “No, it was dead boring.”

“It was my life’s work anyhow,” Mellenby said quietly. “Even if you never understood it.”

“And we both know where your life’s work led us.” Nightingale tossed the paper down onto the tabletop, where it landed with a _thwack_. “Your dangerous nonsense must not be encouraged, and I will especially not allow it to distract Peter.” 

I wasn’t really loving being discussed in such a way, like I wasn’t right there at the breakfast table with them. It felt like being five again. But honestly, I would only get mad about that later. Right that moment, I was way too busy staring at them in rapt attention as they argued.

“Please, Thomas, don’t!” Mellenby got out of his seat looking hurt, looking slighted, and I knew he was going to cry again. “How can you say these things! You never used to-- you know, in the past you'd at least _pretend_ to be interested in what I do. What happened to you? What happened to the man I fell in love with?”

I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. Reader, holy fuck.

Nightingale also rose to his feet. “That was a hundred years ago, David. A lot has happened since then, some of which you even had the good grace to be present for. I was in a war, for starters, you might remember it.”

“Oh, _I_ might remember it?” Up to this point, Mellenby had seemed soft, and sad, and apologetic. Now I could see he was getting peeved. “I came home from said war three weeks ago, and I slept for a while, and now here you are telling me a new century has dawned. I did not experience the eighty years since then, I have not had the luxury of time to heal all wounds.”

Nightingale’s eyes widened. His fist met the table, making me flinch and all the dishes rattle. “The luxury?” he asked. “The fucking _luxury?!”_

I had never heard him raise his voice like that outside of active combat. It broadsided me, but not as much as the f-bomb.

I got up and quickly downed the rest of my normal coffee, even if it was too hot and I singed my tongue a little. “I’ll be at the firing range, yeah? If you need me.” Then I made my escape, right past Molly, whom I tried to give a supportive and encouraging smile. I don’t think they heard me at all. I was halfway down the hallway when the first china dish shattered.

* * *

Nightingale joined me at the firing range later, as I was just getting done chucking a few fireballs at my least favorite target. I don’t mean to brag, but I was pretty happy with how they were coming along in terms of speed and strength. Against a tank, my chances were probably still slim, but I was certain I was getting there. When I say ‘joined me’ I mean I ducked aside as Nightingale pulverized a few targets with uncharacteristic aggression. Soon we’d have to get new ones again.

“You’re making progress,” he said, and internally I preened a bit at the rare compliment.

“Thank you, sir,” I replied in a sufficiently casual and manly voice. “You just got done breaking dishes up there?”

He sighed. “I didn’t mean to break a cup. I’ll have to apologize to Molly later, and about the carpet as well while I’m at it. He’s right, we shouldn’t drag her into this, she’s done more than enough for us.”

I didn’t have to ask who _he_ was. “Is it… wrong that I kind of do want to talk to him about his theories?”

Nightingale gave me an impressive scowl. “When your apprenticeship ends,” he said, “you’re free to experiment in any way you see fit, even, I suppose, with David’s nonsense. But as long as I have a say in it, I would encourage you to master the correct use of the formae before you go on twisting them and utilizing them for all sorts of frivolities. We must become familiar with the function of a thing before we can take it apart. Even David always used to hold to that.”

I nodded. I hadn’t really been expecting much else. “But what if he knows something that would be immediately useful? In a tight spot, I mean, or for a case.”

Nightingale looked at me, a little too wide-eyed. “I should hope not,” he said. “David ended up devoting most of his… inventiveness to the war effort. Not only would I empathically loathe to equip you with any of the nasty little spells he came up with, and dearly hope you wouldn’t find yourself in a situation fit to use them, but you would not enjoy possession or knowledge of them. Besides, it has been quiet.”

It was true, it had been rather quiet since Lesley had left me handcuffed to Martin Chorley’s corpse. She hadn’t been in contact lately, and she proved all but impossible to find. She might have left town, there was no way to tell. Besides, would I want to use a ‘nasty little spell’ on Lesley May? I’d rather not be faced with that choice, and I reckoned Nightingale knew that.

“We’re talking some sort of… battle magic,” I guessed.

“Close-combat practice, is what we said.” Nightingale crossed his arms, as if having to shield himself against a sudden cold. “ _Battle magic_ makes it sound so… heroic. I wouldn’t have you romanticize it, yes, it was mostly ways to kill. Multiple targets at a broader scope. Single targets at wider ranges, snipers and the such. At close range, quickly and painlessly, slowly while causing pain. The works. Many of these creations were volatile and messy, tenth-order or higher disasters. Nothing I’d want any apprentice of mine to learn.”

I frowned. I found I really, really didn’t want to think on ‘slowly while causing pain’. “A tenth-order spell on a battlefield? Who _does_ that?”

“I,” Nightingale said simply. It wasn’t to brag or showcase his talent. His voice was hollow, his eyes far-off and dull, looking back at something not here, something I was fairly glad I wasn’t seeing. “David was lucky to have me on hand.”

“Were you together through the whole of it?”

“Well, most of it. We did what we could to ensure we’d stay together, and command knew we made an effective team.”

I decided what the hell, I’d just go for it. I was curious. Mellenby had just been chucked into my life, no one had deigned to explain anything to me, and I wanted information. “You guys were in _love_ love, huh?”

Nightingale huffed. “Quite. How would you like to try a new forma?”

It was a blatant attempt at distraction. A part of me wanted to fall for it. “How did that work?” I asked anyway.

“Clandestinely.” Nightingale rolled up his sleeves. “Why don’t we step over into the lab?”

We had just about gotten around to that when Molly appeared in the doorway, handing Nightingale his phone. If she still held a grudge about a broken cup, she didn’t show it, but she maybe handed the phone over a bit more coolly than usual.

“Oh, it must be Abdul with the test results. Thank you, Molly.” Nightingale answered the phone. What ensued was one of these situations where I stood there listening to Nightingale’s side of the conversation and entertained myself by mentally trying to fill in the gaps on Walid’s end. Which wasn’t all that easy, because Nightingale mostly said “Yes” and “Hm” and “No, that’s perfectly alright with me”. 

“Well, the results are in,” he told me after he’d hung up. “They’re about what you’d expect.”

“So… he’s a completely normal human person?” I ventured.

Nightingale nodded. “Still, we should visit the cemetery, to make sure.”

 _It’s like you don’t_ want _it to actually be him,_ I thought. _What’s with that?_ I didn’t say it out loud. One does not simply psychoanalyze one’s boss. What I ended up asking was, “I thought the _signare_ check was already foolproof?”

“To the best of our knowledge, it is,” Nightingale admitted. “But I’d like to tie up all loose ends here.” He sighed and leaned against one of the desks, and for a moment he looked… well, he never looks his age, but he looked weary, for a second. “Is that reasonable?” he asked. “I like to think I’m comporting myself reasonably, generally. But when it comes to this situation, I have my doubts.”

I opted for what I thought was safest. “That’s for you to judge, sir.”

“I appreciate your genuine insight, Peter,” Nightingale said. And sure, he looked past me at the ceiling as he said it, but it _still totally counted_. 

I guess I must have looked or sounded surprised when I replied, “Do you, sir?” because he gave me a peculiar glance and said, “Yes, of course. You’ve had some very sound ideas while I’ve had you here. Your efforts are bringing the Folly into the modern world in a way I could never have executed and would never have thought to. Surely you must know that.”

“Sir,” I said neutrally.

“Oh, come now,” Nightingale insisted. “I must have told you that at _some_ point.”

I cleared my throat. “Usually you say I’m easily distracted and accident-prone.” I grinned and tried to make it sound like a little inside joke between us, light-hearted banter, nothing serious. Nothing I was _taking_ seriously. It probably came out wrong, and I felt silly about it.

Nightingale fiddled with his collar, looking almost a bit sheepish. “I have perhaps not been the most forthcoming in terms of positive feedback.”

He didn’t have to say it, but I knew he wasn’t a natural teacher. He hadn’t wanted to be, and it didn’t come easily to him. But he’d been - he was - the only one for the job. It really wasn’t worth dwelling on. “Here’s some honest insight, sir,” I said, “maybe the magical handcuffs are a bit much.”

“I don’t think they are,” Nightingale said. So much for incorporating my opinions. “We should not have a fully trained practitioner with David’s creativity and expertise running around unchecked whom we cannot fully trust.”

“Can we not fully trust your boyfriend, sir?” I asked straight out, and Nightingale shook his head.

“He’s not my… he was that. It was a while ago.”

“Then what is he?”

Nightingale took a second to mull that over. “He’s… his status is pending,” he said. “Now, I believe I was about to show you a new forma, so please focus.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I think dogs should vote voice] I think Nightingale committed war crimes


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nightingale goes over some backstory. David discovers recent history. Peter’s therapist WILL hear about this.

Nightingale got his permit to grave-rob. Well, officially we were following a lead connected to a cold Falcon case that had suddenly warmed up. Inofficially, we were… actually in fact doing that, but we were also very much opening the grave of DCI Nightingale’s former (former?) boyfriend.

The military cemetery was depressing in its uniformity, the way places like this usually are. It must have been thousands of identical headstones. The fact that many of these graves were empty, because in a staggering amount of cases the body couldn’t have been recovered, did not make the environment any more cheerful.

The Folly practitioners were all buried close to each other - those that were, in fact, buried here and hadn’t been left spread across the European Theatre - as they would have liked, Nightingale said. 

“Officer present,” he muttered, patting one of the headstones, a twist to his mouth that sent a little stab to my chest.

“Would be weird, huh, if they came out and saluted?” I said, maybe attempting to lighten the mood. Maybe it was just another case of me being unable to keep my damned mouth shut.

“One has,” Nightingale remarked in that wry way of his. “Look, this is Ballantine. I knew him at Casterbrook.” He peered down the long line of graves. He was introducing me to his friends, I realized, and it felt horrible. “And next to him is Smith, and Dance. There’s Simmons, he was only nineteen. Blaise, he could do this impression of Churchill that had us all in stitches. _We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds_ … you know? Here’s Greenway, a good friend of David’s. And here we are already at our destination.”

Many of these graves were bare, no one having visited, evidently, in a while. David Mellenby’s grave was not so. Two tiny paper flags were stuck in the damp earth below the headstone, crossed, a union jack, then another one. It was even the new-fangled rainbow, I noticed, with the black and brown stripe added. London Pride had been three weeks ago, so I could probably deduce where he’d gotten that. There was a flower too, now wilted, the petals almost completely crumbled into nothing, but even with my limited knowledge of botany, I could recognize a rose when I saw one. There was a sudden lump in my throat. Let nobody tell you that ancient, stern magicians can’t be sentimental buggers when the mood strikes.

I had expected Nightingale to have some spell at his disposal that would instantly remove all the soil in our way, but he just handed me a shovel and waited. Honestly, I sometimes wondered how he’d ever gotten anything done before acquiring his own constable. (He… hadn’t, mostly. He hadn’t at all.) The colleagues at Belgravia could have had an excavator here to get this done within minutes, what the Folly had, especially after the commissioner had gotten acerbic with us recently once more about our budget and the way we'd gone through a chunk of it during Operation Jennifer, was myself and a shovel.

It wasn’t every day that I had to dig a large hole, and soon I was sweating. It was beginning to run down my back when my shovel hit something solid. 

I guess I had somehow managed to avoid thinking about the fact that I was standing in an open grave digging for a coffin. But now I had to awkwardly crouch in the hole and unearth the damned thing, and while it was the middle of the day, not at all conductive to a spooky cemetery atmosphere, it was still eerie.

The coffin was partially covered by a length of rotting fabric - “That would be the flag,” Nightingale said - but the wood of it was still entirely intact and very well-preserved. That smelled fishy right away, seeing as nearly eighty years had indeed gone by. I checked for _vestigia_ , but if there was anything, it was very faint and very faded. Nightingale slid into the hole with me, rather elegantly really. 

“Shall we open it?” he suggested, and I had to remind him to put a pair of one-way gloves on, which he did, and then we cracked the coffin open.

“Well,” I said after a moment of just staring, “I don’t know what the hell that is, but it’s not human remains.”

What we saw lying in the coffin had the rough shape and size of an adult person, but the resemblance was very much cursory. It was a life-sized construct, a doll of some sort, woven from what had to be thousands of small wooden branches, layered on top of each other to evoke the approximate shape of a head, a torso, legs, arms crossed over the chest. There was no discernible face, no hair, and only a few scraps of clothing that had long since rotted away.

I poked the strange figure with a gloved finger. The ancient, dry wood crumbled under my rather light touch. “What is this, sir?”

“Hmm.” Nightingale eyed it thoughtfully. “It seems to be a changeling construct. You don’t see many of these anymore. That’s… clever. Very unconventional. Very _David_ , but he couldn’t have created this by himself. He had to have an accomplice in the demi-monde.”

“A changeling?” Immediately, I had to think of my adventure in Herefordshire. “Like Nicole Lacey?”

Nightingale shook his head. “ _Changeling_ is another one of these umbrella terms. This is an artificial construct, not a living being. The high fae didn’t always substitute members of their own societies for the people they took. In some cases they would leave constructs like this one behind. A fae would have woven something like this from twigs or reeds and enchanted it to mimic life for a short while. When the glamour inevitably collapsed, it would look like the person had died.”

“Could David… Mr. Mellenby… could he have used it to mimic a dead body? And the spell would have worn off after the funeral?”

“That seems to have been the purpose of this arrangement,” Nightingale agreed. “But again, David couldn’t have created a changeling. It’s entirely possible that he called in a favor from one of his contacts in the demi-monde. He was always seeking out the fae, forging friendships, researching. Very odd, for that time.”

I wondered why he had to have asked for help from a fae, and voiced that question. According to Nightingale, not even Mellenby with his unorthodox faerie friends could avail himself of their type (brand? flavor?) of magic. Creating a changeling was simply not something Newtonian practitioners were trained to do, and the demi-monde at that time had been even more tight-lipped regarding their secrets than they were at present. 

“He really was serious about faking it,” I said. “Manufacturing a fake corpse… he wanted to drop off the map really badly, huh?”

Nightingale nodded. “Yes, it’s all… a bit much, isn’t it? I understand wanting to quit the service making a clean break, but this seems excessive. Moving somewhere quiet and avoiding the reunions usually does the trick. Hell, I don’t attend the reunions, and I’m left alone these days.”

“Is it… uncharacteristically excessive, do you think?” 

Nightingale directed a thoughtful look to the grey, cloudy sky as he pondered that. He’s not a copper in the blood, in the Sam Vimes kind of way, he’s always been a soldier happening to be doing police work, and I suspect he always will be. But enough coppering had rubbed off on him that he knew where this line of inquiry was going.

“No,” he said at last. “David could get extremely melodramatic sometimes. About important things.”

I tried to imagine how Mellenby must have felt, right after Ettersberg. Guilty, Hugh Oswald had hinted at. He had shared knowledge with people who had turned around and used what he had shared to build Ettersberg, to commit unspeakable crimes against humanity there. Hundreds of his comrades had died in an attempt to get their hands onto that knowledge, to, in a way, correct the mistake he’d made trusting the wrong people. He’d gotten back to England in place of his boyfriend. He had thought that his colossal fuckup had to have claimed Nightingale’s life. 

“He must’ve been really serious about no one coming to look for him,” I said.

Nightingale’s expression grew as clouded as the sky. “Oh, certainly,” he said. “He might have taken over _my_ duties, had I not returned home.”

“Huh?” I asked eloquently.

“Command enjoyed his scientific expertise during the war,” Nightingale said, somewhat scathingly. “Besides, he’d never been wounded…” ( _Because you were there ensuring that,_ I thought but did not say) “…he would have been in an ideal position to inherit mastery of the Folly. I was considered missing in action at the time, as were a number of other, even likelier candidates. It’s not a duty either of us ever aimed for or desired. So he _ran away.”_

 _Like a coward,_ he didn’t add but I could almost hear it nonetheless. Now Nightingale, when faced with the duty of guarding the ruins of British magic, of remaining the last one standing, of shouldering responsibility for all of Britain’s magic-related concerns, had accepted it unflinchingly. He must have also been tired, physically and mentally, he’d been shot, he’d lost everyone he’d held dear. But he hadn’t run for the hills. He hadn’t always done the most stellar job as Britain’s last official wizard, but at the very least he’d been there.

“So that’s why you’re so mad at him, huh,” I assumed. 

Nightingale shrugged. He looked very… resigned. “Is that it?” he asked. “Can I fault him for doing a runner? There were others who could have continued to serve in some capacity, not many, but there were a few. They chose to break their staves. Can I begrudge them that? They were my men, my lads, and I wished for them to heal. To get to enjoy life in peace.”

God, that noble, self-sacrificial bastard. I really wanted to throttle him.

“What is it then?” I asked instead. “Why is it still all weird and sad? I mean, no offense sir, but if I had a dead boyfriend and he suddenly came back, I would be dancing in the streets or something.”

Nightingale sighed, and then, right there at the open, empty grave, I got the full story.

* * *

So apparently on the eve of Ettersberg - well, not the literal eve, the actual operation had been a few weeks off yet - but when select officers were first briefed on the mission, there had been some disagreement on how to proceed. Hugh Oswald had already told me some of it, back in Herefordshire, that Nightingale had been against it from the get-go. That he’d wanted the site bombed from altitude and nothing else to do with it. Now, as a Captain he hadn’t held nearly enough sway to affect command decisions of that magnitude. But The Nightingale wasn’t just any Captain. As perhaps the most gifted and capable practitioner the Folly had turned out in his generation - he didn’t say that to me, but I extrapolated from what I recalled Hugh Oswald having told me - and one of Britain’s most experienced combat practitioners, he had enjoyed a certain reputation. And above all, he had held the unswerving and unyielding loyalty of his men.

That loyalty was hard-earned and entirely reciprocated, and when Nightingale had heard, after years of fighting the Nazis for every inch of ground, that they were sending all available troops into a death trap hundreds of miles beyond the front, he’d gone a bit ballistic. He had appealed to command to reconsider, and he’d voiced his opposition loudly and clearly, and word had gotten around to the enlisted men. 

Now, in your ordinary army, the disarray would have stopped there. Command structures and the prevailing culture would have ensured it. But the Folly battallion hadn’t been composed of ordinary foot-soldiers. The Folly practitioners had been, to a Private, sons of England’s proud upper middle class. They’d been men who came from money, men of privilege, men used to having their voices heard. So someone got it in his head to start petitioning against the objective, to take a stand, to rally around the Nightingale. He himself had had nothing to do with the petition, he told me; it had been the work of some fool NCO and he in fact only found out about it later.

But army hierarchy had still applied, and Nightingale had summarily been dragged off the field, into battallion command and thence back to London before a board of generals. He had been told in no uncertain terms that what he was doing was considered an act of treason against King and country, and that, out of respect for his service record and the loyalty of his men, he would be offered a choice: retract his opposition, stand down, be a good soldier and go to Ettersberg, or have himself and everyone who’d backed him up court-martialed, lined up against a wall and shot for mutiny.

“At that point, I would have let myself be shot alright,” he told me, “if I thought it might help prevent the worst. But all of my men, no. So I chose compliance… I granted the lads the fate of uncertain over certain death. And a handful of those petitioners actually did end up making it home.”

It was rare that I ever got a war story out of him, so of course I listened. This one was dreary, though, and I couldn’t believe they’d still gone around executing their own men by firing squad all the way in 1945. A less civilized age, indeed. 

“What does that have to do with Da- with Mr. Mellenby?”

“Lieutenant,” Nightingale corrected absentmindedly. “Lieutenant Mellenby. Well, while I was opposing Operation Spatchcock, David was in favor.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I told him of the risk. I told him it would be a suicide run. He called me paranoid. He said surely they wouldn’t muster all we had left and send us off to die. Surely that was a ridiculous proposition. I told him he had always been a bit naive as to the way the world worked.”

He sighed. “He gave me a lot of regurgitated rhetoric from the mission briefing about stopping the fascists from continuing to commit their heinous atrocities, for the sake of their prisoners, for the glory of the empire. We got into a right row about the role of the empire in the world. Not that David really cared about the British Empire any more than I did. No, David had been personally slighted, and David wanted his research back. And he seemed willing to delude himself so far as to believe he wouldn’t have to climb over the bodies of our lads to get it.”

Reader, even if I’d known what to say to that, I genuinely didn’t dare interrupt Nightingale now. He was far away again, but this time his expression held none of the dull grief and shell-shock that seemed to be his constant companions. At this moment he was frighteningly alive, standing tall, encased by vivid fury. For a moment, I could see the man he’d been, the war hero. If I’d been some dude named Hans in a Wehrmacht uniform in 1945 catching sight of him, I honestly probably would’ve just shit myself.

“The thing is,” Nightingale continued, and even his tone had gone clipped and militaristic around the edges, as though he was giving an after-action report, “that petition was almost successful. Command really did stick their heads together for a moment and attempt to calculate whether the prognosticated loss of life could be considered worth the empirical value of the Black Library. To determine the answer to that question, they consulted a scientific expert. A scholar on the topic.”

“Oh, shit,” I said.

Nightingale looked at me, and seemed to simmer down. The years settled back across his shoulders like a soft but heavy blanket, the incensed soldier vanishing again. “Indeed,” he said. “And David told them yes, in his opinion, it would be worth it. He got what he wanted. He really must have hugged himself that night. I certainly didn’t. And when the time came to face the consequences, he ran away.”

“I guess I get now why you punched him,” I said.

“Take some samples of that wooden doll for Abdul,” Nightingale said, tossing us abruptly back into the present. “I hope you thought to bring a forensic bag.”

* * *

Mellenby took the news that he was undeniably himself pretty well. It was just about the only thing that went right that afternoon.

It all started going sideways when we got back to the Folly and ran into Molly in the atrium, as was often the case. When Nightingale asked her where David was, she pointed a finger downwards, indicating the basement, and I swear to god all colour went out of Nightingale’s face within a single second.

“Molly, he’s not… in the old lab, is he?”

Molly nodded.

I think me still being there was the only reason Nightingale didn’t break into a sprint.

I followed him as he power-walked down the stairs and down the hallway leading to the laboratories. Most of them were still unused to this day, but Nightingale stopped in front of a particular door. It was quite a solid door, but I was a bit unsettled by the silence beyond it. I knew Nightingale and I were thinking the same thing.

I kept my eyes fixed on his back, the tense line of his shoulders in the sturdy tweed he considers his work suit, as he reached out for the doorknob. I could spot a slight tremor in that hand. I heard his breath, a bit heavier than normal. For a moment, his hand hovered, an eternity caught in a second. Then he seemed to snap out of it, and in one decisive movement he turned the handle and wrenched the door open.

The air was stale in the room beyond, evidence of how long it had been in disuse. Most of the furniture had been covered by dust sheets, now torn down and haphazardly stacked in a corner. One of the closets was open, revealing dusty, out-of-date equipment. There were several desks, the surfaces tiled, the wooden lab benches shoved underneath worn smooth by continuous use decades ago. There was an ancient enamel sink with faucet, what had, in the old days, probably passed for an eye wash station. And there, by the ancient sink, David Mellenby was patiently and intently cleaning a beaker.

“David,” Nightingale said. It came out in one big whoosh of air.

Mellenby looked up. Today he was wearing a jumper over his shirt, overlarge and a bit worn, but cozy-looking. “Thomas!” he exclaimed with a smile, “And Peter… Constable Grant… hello.” So he wasn’t sure what to call me either. The feeling was mutual.

“You don’t intend to use this lab again, do you?” Nightingale demanded. Mellenby’s smile fell against the banked emotion in his voice, and whatever he saw gleaming in his eyes.

“It’s my laboratory,” he said. “Of course I intend to put it back to use. You left everything as it was, correct?”

“I suppose I can’t keep you from your… work, huh,” Nightingale said.

“You’re keeping me from my magic already.” Mellenby tugged at the cuffs he still was made to wear. “There’s not much I can do here without it, but… I must work. I must experiment. I know why you’re hesitant about it, believe me I do understand your doubts exactly, but I can’t not do my job.”

“You don’t have a job here now,” Nightingale remarked. _Ouch_ , I thought. Me, I would be stung if someone - if he - told me that. 

Evidently, Mellenby was too. But he only amended, “Say my calling, then.”

“Your _calling_.” Nightingale exhaled forcibly. “I can see there’s no stopping you. But, in here?”

“Why not? I always used this room.”

“You _scared_ me,” Nightingale admitted. “When I heard you were down here… goodness, David, what was I supposed to think?”

“Now, it’s not… you know now nothing actually ever happened in here. I can move past that, can’t you?” Mellenby turned, and devoted his attention to the beaker in his hands again. He finished dusting it off, and reached for another one.

“Move past that! Just like that, hm? Of all the obstinate, insensitive–”

“You’re calling me insensitive? Ever since I got back here, you’ve been impossible, posturing like some–”

“Oh, now I’m posturing? It’s morbid, that’s all…”

“It’s not like anyone ever actually died in here, you know! But I suppose you command where I go within _your_ Folly–”

Mellenby had said that last resolutely glaring at the vial he was polishing. Nightingale stepped into his space and slapped it out of his hand. Glass shattered all over the floor. Such a rash, aggressive, _juvenile_ gesture from Nightingale shocked me. 

“Now you look _here_ , David–”

I ducked out of the door, not least to avoid the glass shards, but moreso to avoid this absolute scene. Molly was hovering a few steps from the door, hands clenched into her dress and a worried look on her face.

I gave her a frown of sympathy, and we both shrugged, because what can one do?

Something else shattered within the laboratory, and I chanced a quick peek inside, fearing that they were full-on fighting now. They were pressed up against a desk, hands clenched in each other’s lapels, kissing furiously, and I mean _furiously_.

It was a good thing they’d stopped noticing me a while ago, because I couldn’t stop staring if they’d paid me to. It’s not every day you get to see Nightingale be anything but unflappable, and to see him now, my distant, regal guv’nor, all but wrapped around another bloke, one of David’s hands in his hair, messing up that careful side-part, tugging to what I imagined was the point of pain, to hear him muffle some _noise_ against David’s lips, ugh, well…

Feeling a bit hot under the collar suddenly for some reason, I turned back to Molly, who had arched an eyebrow but was looking no less worried.

“God, what the fuck,” I said to her. “Were they always like that?”

Molly shook her head. It occurred to me that of course, she’d already worked and lived here since before the 1920s, she’d know - perhaps - the way of things back then.

“Wonder what it _was_ like,” I said, not knowing what I was expecting from her. Did I want her to, what, whip out a notebook and start taking down the story? 

Then Molly did something… weird.

For a moment she paused, her head cocked as if she were deliberating something. Then she suddenly grabbed me, something she had never done before, and she was very close, and I could see all her teeth, and–

I was stood in the same hallway, but different, observing from the outside, somehow. Molly was no longer in front of me, but on the stairs holding a broom, sweeping down. Just to test my hypothesis on what was happening here, I went up to her and waved a hand in front of her face. She didn’t react. So this was… elsewhere, elsewhen, even with her looking like the same old Molly.

I heard steps down the stairs and soon a young man appeared, one I had some initial trouble recognizing as Nightingale. I put this Nightingale in his early thirties at most, and not only was he not nearly as buttoned up as the Nightingale of the present, his whole demeanor was markedly different. There was a skip in his step, that smile on his face that made him look all of fourteen openly and permanently displayed, his hair artfully ruffled rather than strictly parted. There was a carelessness to him that was, to me, entirely alien.

“Hello, Molly,” said the Other Nightingale. “Is he in?”

Molly nodded.

“I’ll just…” He maneuvered himself past her on the stairs with a natural, fluid grace. “…pop on in then.”

Molly put a finger to her lips. The Other Nightingale laughed.

“Yes, yes, careful. I know, I’m always careful. You keep an eye on the hallway, yes? Splendid.” He sauntered, I noticed, towards the same door I had just exited. Halfway there, he turned around again. “Thanks, Molly. Don’t know what we’d do without you.”

Molly shook her head, in a display of fondness, I thought.

The laboratory, when he went in, was different, all surfaces clean to the point of shining, not a speck of dust in sight, but very much in use. All kinds of equipment and folders with notes covered the desks, all but one at which Mellenby was working. He was in a lab coat, and also looked younger, but it was undeniably him. He was doing something fiddly with a pipette and large petri dish, in which some unknown liquid was currently drying.

“Davey, thought I’d find you in here,” Nightingale said, giving Mellenby a fetching grin, which was met with an absentminded smile. Mellenby looked up from his work with an expression in his eyes that communicated both preoccupation and inordinate fondness.

“Ah, good morning, Thomas.”

“Morning? It’s almost noon.” Nightingale sat down on a lab bench as if he was in the habit to, like he was in and out of here every other day. “Been holed up in here since before breakfast, have you?”

“Yes, I’m… afraid I missed it, didn’t I?” Mellenby crossed the room from one desk to another, scribbling something in an open notebook. “I was going to go up and grab a bite to eat, but time got away from me.”

“And you with your nice new watch.”

“Hmmm.” Mellenby picked up another notebook, leafing through it. For a while he worked silently, peering at samples of something through a microscope and taking notes. Nightingale observed him with an expression of good-natured ignorance on his face, but I saw him grow bored by degrees. Soon he adjusted his tie, shifted in his seat and ran a hand through his hair. Only when he huffed theatrically, a bit of a pout on his face, did I understand that he was preening for his boyfriend’s attention, and I was glad they couldn’t hear the sudden laugh this shocked out of me.

When he wasn’t getting what he wanted, Nightingale leaned back on the lab bench in now starkly evident boredom and cast a tiny werelight. He popped _impello_ and something else on it that I wasn’t familiar with, which enabled him to bounce the werelight off the table and into his palm like a small, glowing tennis ball. He did that a few times and then started shifting it between his fingers, obviously just fidgeting to keep himself occupied.

It got Mellenby to pay attention to him at last. “Thomas, stop. Your magic in here might taint the emulsion.”

“Oh, by all means.” Nightingale extinguished the werelight, looking just slightly put out. “I’ll get out of your hair, then, lest I taint your emulsion.”

That finally got Mellenby to put his many notebooks down. “Is something wrong, Thomas?”

Nightingale sighed. “Nothing. Well…”

Mellenby rounded the table, until he was stood directly in front of Nightingale, resting those large, clear eyes on him. They weren’t touching, anyone barging in would have seen nothing but an intent conversation between friends. But to someone in the know, which I was, there was a sort of intimacy in it, in how they leaned so close together. “Well?”

“I’m only in the country for another week. Once I leave, we might not see each other for half a year. I was hoping we might do something together, something other, that is, than me watching you work.”

“Oh.” Mellenby looked startled. “Oh songbird, oh no. Of course I want to go out with you, these experiments are rather time-sensitive, that’s all.”

“Well, you knew a month in advance when I’d be at the Folly. Yet you simply had to start a time-sensitive experiment just now. If it’s something I did, will you please let me know?”

Mellenby inhaled sharply. “Oh dear. You’re right, that was thoughtless of me. Of course you did nothing wrong. I’m overjoyed to have you here, to talk to you in person, to… just to see you. I was simply so enthusiastic about getting results here, I clean forgot we didn’t have all that much time.” For just a second, he leaned in, resting his forehead against Nightingale’s. “I’ll see if I can wrap up here by tomorrow, alright? Will you forgive me?”

“Tomorrow? But yesterday you said it would take several–”

“There’ll be time enough to start anew once you’re back in Lahore. And I’ll tell you what.” Mellenby disengaged, stepping back behind his desk and retrieving a folded piece of paper from a drawer. “This is a letter from my father. He owns this hunting lodge, out in the countryside. Not that he goes there anymore, on account of his injury. He’s been asking and asking me to go out and check on it. Next time you’re in the country, we could go there together. Hmm? Make a real holiday of it.”

Nightingale cocked his head. “You don’t even like to hunt.”

“We wouldn’t have to. It’ll be us two and the wilderness. Nice fishing pond, too. No one else for miles. Just you and me and a sizeable bed at our disposal.”

“What…” Nightingale lowered his voice to a near-whisper, “ _Share_ a bed?”

Mellenby grinned. “If we take enough provisions along, we won’t have to get up for days.”

“Davey!” I swear, not once has Nightingale ever been this gleeful in my presence. He swept around the desk and caught Mellenby in a hug, tilting his head to bring their lips together.

“Thomas!” David hissed. “If someone sees!”

“No one’s here to see,” Nightingale murmured against his lips. “No windows. Molly’s outside watching the door. Come on, just this once. Admit it, you’ve always wanted me in here.”

Mellenby huffed out a startled little laugh. “More to the point, _you’ve_ wanted _me_ in here. Distract me from my work like the menace you are.” Even as he said it, he was backing them up against the desk, hands coming around to rest on Nightingale’s backside and squeezing.

“Mh.” Another kiss, this one deeper, hungrier. “My diligent scientist. I would never.”

“Liar. Tease.” Mellenby stifled a moan, eyes falling closed as Nightingale’s thigh rubbed up between his legs. “Oh- songbird. My sweet songbird.”

I was pretty sure where this was going, and that I didn’t necessarily need to see any more. Thankfully, Molly seemed to share my view, or maybe she too had stopped watching at this point back then. In any case, I felt a sudden, painful, nauseating tug, and I stood out in the hallway again with Molly’s cold, bony hands on my forearms. She let go of me immediately and took a step back, as if apprehensive, maybe afraid she’d overstepped. Had she wanted to share this memory so badly? And most importantly, how had she done that? I leaned against the wall. I was dizzy.

Just as I decided to go upstairs and maybe sit down for a bit, Nightingale came back out of the lab. He gave me and Molly a somewhat quizzical look. He was just slightly ruffled, his tie a bit askew, his lips… oh dear… his lips red and slightly raw from kissing. 

“What are you two still doing out here?” he asked.

Molly gave him a look that in essence communicated that she wasn’t standing here for any particular reason, that she did have every right to stand here, that she was going to stop standing here anyway, that she had much better things to do than stand here, and anyway who was he to ask? Then she turned and swept off.

I settled for a simpler shrug.

“Was there anything you needed, Peter?” Nightingale asked me. Behind him, Mellenby stuck his head out of the door. His lips also were very pink and plump, the lower one even bleeding a little. My boss had bitten someone bloody. It should have just been ridiculous, but it sent a chill down my back.

“It’s nothing, sir,” I said. “I was headed for…” Well, what would I be headed for? I’d followed him down here in the first place because I, too, had been worried about this bloke I’d known for a little over two days now. The gym, I might say, because that was this way, or the firing range. But honestly I didn’t feel up to actually going either of these places. I’d already dug a huge hole, unearthed a coffin, and been subject to whatever Molly had just done to me. All I wanted was a break.

“I was going back upstairs,” I said. “If there’s nothing else on, I’ll just be in the tech cave.”

Nightingale nodded. “Do go. You look a tad… worn.”

 _And you look kissed._ I didn’t say that, but I got embarrassingly close. It was weird, how my eyes kept wandering towards his lips. Could I spot a remnant of some moisture there? From Mellenby’s mouth? And why did I care, anyway? It was weird, watching Nightingale get handsy with his boyfriend in Molly’s memory had done nothing to or with me. That had been a stranger I’d been watching, a person I’d never known, not my… not the Nightingale I was familiar with. But the man right in front of me right now was very, very real.

And… so what? He was allowed to have a life, I guessed.

* * *

Bev was in class right then, but she still answered my texts. _How are things at the Folly?_ she wanted to know.

 _Still no new case for us,_ I told her.

_I meant the Nightingale and his boyfriend situation._

_It’s like watching a telenovela but with old white men,_ I texted her back. _All cattiness and dramatic fight scenes and wild accusations and throwing stuff around. But old white men._

I didn’t tell her about my strange recent observations on Nightingale’s lips; it wouldn’t have been fair on her. Or would it? I needed more time to think about it, and at the same time, I wanted to avoid investing any further thought in it at all. I mean, why did all this even weird me out so much? Sure, I’d never seen Nightingale with anyone before, romantically, nor had he ever mentioned anything like that. But we weren’t attached at the hip, were we? We spent plenty of time apart, during which he might have gotten up to conceivably anything. Why did that thought seem so strange?

I just wasn’t used to thinking of Nightingale like that, I supposed, precisely because I never saw him… date, or whatever, and he never spoke about it. He had seemed, to me, as completely platonic as, say, Molly, or a potted fern, or a lamp. Objectively a good-looking bloke, sure, but I’d pegged him as completely uninterested in any of that. Well, you know someone until you don’t, as experience had proven.

If anything, I reckoned that while I’d been out looking for fun, I had pictured Nightingale in the Folly as always, reading… a slim volume of metaphysical poetry, or something, or sitting in a wall closet plugged into a charger until duty called. Well, maybe that was a bit much. The man wasn’t a robot. He was… he was an institution, was what he was. Nightingale was the Folly. I’d just supposed whenever I was out with Bev, or Lesley back in the day or even Simone, Nightingale would be… here. Not going anywhere. Always waiting.

(Waiting for what?)

(Waiting for me to come back…?)

I dwelled a bit on Molly’s memory, the one she had shared with me. She’d chosen a good one to get her point across. Nightingale and Mellenby had once been a normal couple: in secret, sure, given the times, but still… a normal couple who had pet names, made plans, bantered lovingly, had problems sometimes but talked them out in a level-headed and harmonious way. There was nothing level-headed about that mess now.

 _It’s not my relationship drama,_ I reminded myself once again. Sure, the novelty of Nightingale having a love life drove me to pay attention to it, but really it was none of my business. 

I was thinking about just taking a look at what was on TV, when I remembered I had a Latin translation yet to finish. I groaned and reached for my textbooks when I heard somebody knock at the door.

Assuming it was probably Nightingale, I called out, “Come on in,” and went to open the door, which revealed David Mellenby instead. He looked… serious, grave.

“Thomas said you would be up here,” he said.

“Anything I can do for you?” I asked.

He nodded. “There’s something I’d like to discuss. May I come in?”

I stepped aside and let him enter. He wandered into the room, momentarily distracted by the changes I’d made to the tech cave. His eyes caught on my laptop that functioned as a HOLMES terminal and then the flatscreen mounted to the wall. “What is that?” he asked.

“It’s a television.” At least he’d picked the easier one to explain. If he’d wanted an intro to computers, we’d most likely be sat here until tomorrow.

“They’ve changed a lot, it seems,” Mellenby remarked. “This must be almost like the cinema.”

“Guess that’s the goal,” I said. “Feel free to come up here if you ever want to watch anything.” It wasn’t like I’d be getting as much use out of it as I once had, what with Bev capital e Expecting and everything. I’d started to wonder, lately, whether I’d soon move into her house completely, and take all of my stuff from the Folly. But Bev probably wouldn’t let me set up a HOLMES terminal at her house, and the Folly was still very much my nick, and would remain so especially if we got new apprentices in at some point in a vaguely defined future, and I simply didn’t have it in me to deprive Nightingale and Molly of their means to watch the rugby or the bakeoff respectively. I wondered idly what Mellenby would want to watch. Documentaries, maybe, or he and Nightingale could cuddle up on the couch and stream Queer Eye. I almost chortled out loud.

“Thanks,” Mellenby said, maybe a bit stiffly. “Much obliged.”

“Hey, not a problem. Um, you said you wanted to talk about something?”

“Yes.” He took a deep breath, as if fortifying himself. “Earlier, in the basement, you were stood before my laboratory. What did you see?”

I wondered where he was going with this. “Drywall?”

“No.” He sighed. “There’s no beating around the bush. Did you see Thomas and myself…?”

“Oh. Did I see you make out? Yeah.”

Mellenby grew pale. “God, I knew this would happen someday.” He was starting to wring his hands.

A bit belatedly, I remembered what he must be thinking now. “I don’t mind,” I said. The treacherous “Many of my friends are gay” was at the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t get to say that, or anything else, because within the blink of an eye, something about Mellenby seemed to… change. Within a second, he grew from nervously agitated to deeply, deadly calm. 

“Thomas has rebuilt a life here,” he said, stepping forward. There was something in his eyes, something… wrong, like he wasn’t… wholly here, mentally. “I will not have anyone endanger that now. We have made it this far.”

He raised a hand, and I could feel that gush-of-air buildup of his _signare_ again and it took no thought at all to raise up a shield as I propelled myself behind the couch and ducked and– nothing. Whatever _forma_ he’d been trying to build was suddenly, abruptly aborted.

Only then did I remember the inhibitor cuffs.

And then the door slammed open, and there was Nightingale, followed on his heels by Molly, and he threw his larger, much more impressive shield between us, and he was livid, I could see it in his face.

“Stand down!” he barked at David, who was so startled he snapped into parade rest. “See, this is why the bloody cuffs stay on!”

He peered over the backrest of the couch down at me, crouched on the floor in a defensive position. “You stand down too,” he said in a much softer voice. “Are you hurt?”

“No, sir.” And thank god all the electronics had been powered down too, I couldn’t afford a new laptop right now. Well, my phone had been on, I’d been using it to text Beverley. Another one ruined. “Just my phone.”

He waved that off. ”I’ll buy you a new one. Are you otherwise alright?”

Was I alright? My first response had been to duck, to make a shield, to defend, and it had come startlingly swiftly, without consulting my brain at all. Otherwise I would have remembered that Mellenby was unable to cast anything. “Well, my therapist will hear about this.”

Nightingale muttered something that sounded like “sorry to hear it” and gave me an absentminded pat on the shoulder as he turned back towards David. “And you! What were you thinking, trying to attack my apprentice?”

At some point, Mellenby had sunk into a squat on the floor. He was now staring down at his hands and avoiding Nightingale’s eyes. It was like all that power I had just now seen and felt in him had poured away again. “He said he saw us… earlier… I was just so scared.”

“I clearly remember telling you that Peter can be trusted with anything you’d trust me with,” Nightingale said sharply. “Including…” He gestured between them. “…this.”

“I didn’t… I forgot. I was just so scared,” Mellenby repeated. “And then for a moment it was like I was… back there.”

“In combat? Hmmm.” A tad gentled, Nightingale put a hand on David’s shoulder and guided him to sit on the couch. “I see, but there is really nothing to be scared of here.”

Mellenby looked exhausted. I doubted Nightingale’s words really registered. Of course, we should have probably considered that he’d be in a volatile mental state seeing as the war was still, to him, very recent. Besides, I doubted Nightingale had had the time or capacity to sit him down for a recent history lecture. 

I tried to feel the scope of it all like he had. All the hiding, the extralegal nature of their relationship back then. All that sneaking around. Punishable by jail time, Nightingale had said. _If anyone sees… keep an eye on the hallway…_ it was a lot. Suddenly, I wanted to be the one to give David the good news.

“It’s not a crime anymore, you know,” I said.

Mellenby looked up at me, pure incomprehension and confusion in his face. “What?”

“Oh, yes. That’s true,” Nightingale said, his hand still on David’s shoulder. “They decriminalized same-sex relations in the sixties. We don’t go to jail for it anymore.”

Mellenby sat in silence, mouth opening and closing for a moment. He looked like a guppy. “You’re telling me… what? When?”

Nightingale rubbed a thumb across David’s shoulder, and for a moment it looked like everything would be okay. “July 27th, 1967. That was the day. Just shortly after I started growing younger. When I tell you I wept over the newspaper.”

“What… does that mean?” David asked. “Is it… we can… in public?”

“Indeed.” Nightingale gave him a lopsided half-smile. “You always did say it was all a temporary quirk of our society, that prejudice.”

Mellenby beamed. “I did say that! I knew that a more enlightened era would dawn someday, and that we’d leave all that behind. Everything is change!”

And just like that, Nightingale’s face turned solemn, and cool, and detached again. “Yes. And then there I was, experiencing the new era without you.” He got up. “I shan’t deal with this right now.” 

And then he left.

He left me alone with his boyfriend.

Mellenby looked torn between a lot of different emotions. He seemed like he didn’t know what to feel or think first, much less what to do. 

“I am deeply sorry,” he said at last. “If I’d known about… this… I wouldn’t have attempted to… attack you, good lord, Thomas is right, what _was_ I thinking?”

“You literally called him ‘the man I fell in love with’ yesterday. I was right there. It’s… I knew.”

“Yes, I did, didn’t I,” he muttered. “How could I have forgotten? It’s as though I lost all control of my actions. All I felt was the panic. Someone having caught us…”

I wanted to say that it was probably at least partially a PTSD thing, but he wouldn’t have known what that was either. Besides, the poor guy did urgently need a crash-course on all the history he’d missed, and it didn’t look like Nightingale was up for it. Inwardly, I sighed. Another item for the to-do list.

“Is he telling the truth?” Mellenby then asked. “Is it… did they really… it’s not illegal now?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” At least here was something nice to talk about. “You know what, if you wanted to, you could walk down the street holding hands with Nightingale, and no one… well, I won’t pretend that some idiots might not still catcall. But no one can arrest you for it. They have flags now, and a pride parade every year where they celebrate being gay and having rights and stuff, and when someone discriminates against you, you can sue them.”

Mellenby sniffled. “A parade? Of people… ahem… people being like this? How many people would possibly attend such an event?”

“In a city like London?” I said. “Easily a million.”

He stared at me for a lengthy moment. Then he said, “I… never dared to imagine there were a million of us in all the world.”

That kind of got to me. How lonely he must have felt. “Welcome to the 21st century,” I said.

Mellenby shifted in his seat, I could see he still had a question. “And I could even… kiss him? On the street?” He asked this almost in a whisper, as if we were discussing some illicit, raunchy behavior.

I grinned at him and tried to imagine Nightingale being kissed on the street. “If he wants that.”

* * *

I wanted to go spend the rest of the day with Bev, finish my Latin homework with her curled up against my side while she studied for her midterm, in peace and quiet, and also explain to her why I’d stopped replying to her texts, and how I’d managed to break yet another phone. But when I tried to step out, Molly and Foxglove both lingered by the door and stared at me until I got the message. They weren’t comfortable being left alone, with tension steadily mounting until the air in the Folly seemed to hum with it. And, well, fuck. I thought about all the things I didn’t know about Molly, all the things I did know of Foxglove, and why they’d be nervous in such an environment. I couldn’t just leave them.

I texted Bev from a burner phone and did my Latin homework in the mundane library all by my lonesome, but by dinner I wished I’d left after all. There wasn’t much talking. Toby, who had been hesitant about Mellenby at first, had grown to adore him because unlike Nightingale, he’d feed him scraps from the table. Molly placed a giant shepherd’s pie on the table before us, and Mellenby chirped, “Oh, my favorite! Thank you, Molly.” and Nightingale sniffed disdainfully and said “I see how it is, Molly,” and otherwise, the only one who spoke up was me, to inform Nightingale that I had finished my translation and left it at his desk in the study. It seemed like whenever fate deigned to nudge the two of them back together, my guv’nor, with the keen eye of the true DCI, unearthed something else to be mad about. 

I excused myself once I was done eating and left them to sit and stare at opposite walls or whatever it was they did. But I’d promised Molly and Foxglove that I wouldn’t just go back to Bev’s house, and I was going to have to keep that promise. So I made my way up to my room and settled in for a long night.


	5. Interlude: Thomas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> HAHA!!! POV CHARACTER CHANGE! Enter the Nightingale zone
> 
> This is where this fic starts to earn its M rating. Light sexual content ahead.

It was strange to say the least to have David here again after all these years. (All these years and not a bit of change.) Sometimes Thomas felt that he was hallucinating it (losing his mind at last) or dreaming. But then again, that couldn’t be the case. If this were a hallucination or a dream, things would be easier. They would be happier.

They would be _happy_.

Thomas had never liked to think - or hallucinate or dream - about how things with David had soured, towards the end. It had been easy to remember the good things exclusively, the companionship, the tenderness, the comfort and thrill and love. David had stayed a joyful memory, despite the tragedy of his (supposed) passing, somehow still an oasis in a desert of grief. Perhaps this had been idealization. It is easy to idealize a dead loved one. It is less easy to keep up that pretense in said loved one’s bodily, live presence.

It was strange, yes. How often had he wished in vain that someone, anyone would come back, just one of them, it didn’t even matter who? Just one other occupied room. Just one person to turn to, when things got rough. Just one person who would understand. Now someone had come back. And not just anyone. David, within reach again, to see, to speak to… to touch. But whenever his hands started reaching out, there was that memory again.

_“Well, I just almost got myself and half the men shot for mutiny.”_

_“Shot for…? Thomas, what on earth did you do?”_

_“I retracted my opposition. Not willingly, mind you. I am to supervise the rearguard. You, Lieutenant, with your expertise, will most likely be part of the task force that’ll retrieve the actual library.”_

_“They split us up?! Thomas… do you think they know?”_

_“What is there to know?”_

_“Songbird, please…”_

_“You got what you wanted, Davey. You won. Operation Spatchcock is a go.”_

And yet, still, despite all that, he could only ever curtail, never stop, the urge to reach and touch. 

It was David, after all. David with that beautiful hair so good for tugging, with his eyes as clear as always, with those sweet, sweet lips. Those capable hands. It was David whose body Thomas knew. Touching would feel like coming home. Touching might piece something back together inside him, something that remained by itself, broken and abandoned and forgotten, for decades and decades. 

And there was something scary in that thought. That David might break him open and unearth that hidden something. That there would have to be a breaking. Thomas could not afford to break another time.

So he left David to sit at the dinner table and stare holes into his plate by himself, went and fetched Peter’s finished Latin homework and attempted to peruse it in the reading room. Peter’s Latin was coming along, at a sedate pace but nonetheless, but today it was abysmal. Clearly he’d had other things on his mind. And who could fault him? After puzzling through the first paragraph of it, Thomas crossed the room to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a glass of Scotch. The bottle was almost (but not quite) as old as he was, and had been nearly emptied slowly, over the decades, a glass or two every other year, because Thomas wasn’t a man who drank to excess.

He found he couldn’t concentrate on the paper before him as well as he would have liked. Scraps of old, old conversations kept reverberating within his mind, loud today, understandable under the circumstances.

_“You’re being paranoid, songbird. I understand, but… I am certain Folly command wouldn’t muster every last wizard of serviceable age just to send them off to die. It will be a tough mission, I’ve no doubt of that. But I’m convinced that we’ll come out on top.”_

_“Bullshit. It’s hundreds of miles behind the front, David. We’ll be cut off from any reinforcements. Nowhere to fall back to. According to intelligence, the place is a death trap.”_

_“And who do you know in intelligence? How would you have gotten an intelligence officer to relinquish that information, hm?”_

_“This is hardly the time. I don’t need to blow intelligence officers to see what’s bloody obvious. You think command cares if we make it through this one? It’s high time you got that pretty head out of your stack of books and faced reality. They’re willing to bet all our lives on this bloody suicide run on the off-chance that someone makes it home with that library.”_

_“There_ is _considerable empirical value to that library.”_

_“Oh? That’s what it’s about, eh, for you? You honestly believe that I am going to stand here and let them slaughter my men for ‘considerable empirical value’. My men, David! I’ve got them this far! I’m not throwing them into the meat grinder for your fucking research.”_

_“Would you prefer seeing said research in the hands of the Nazis? God only knows what they’re doing with it!”_

_“I would see it in the hands of no one. Chuck a few bombs at the place and bury all of it. Damn you and damn your revenge and damn your research.”_

Thomas sighed and poured another glass of Scotch.

Just then, the reason for his discomposure entered the room and sat down in a chair by the fireplace, his back straight, his face resolute, determined. Like he was _going_ to make it work. It irked Thomas, and he didn’t know why, that David wanted to get to the fixing of things. There wouldn’t have been anything _to_ fix if David hadn’t been so stupid as to advocate for the Ettersberg mission.

“May I?” David asked, reaching for the bottle. 

“Get your own.” Waspish. Juvenile. Why couldn’t he stop acting like this? Why didn’t he feel like even wanting to try? Thomas lifted a hand to his temples. His eyes stung. He’d been getting very little sleep lately; the return of David shook loose memories, and the night terrors had come back.

David’s face looked soft in the firelight. almost like before the war, when it had been a little fuller. If Molly kept making pies at the rate she was going, he’d soon get back to normal. Thomas clenched his hands in his lap, and it was as if they were sending him little impulses: _touch him, hold him, have him_. But _spurn him_ , sang his blood, _don’t let him near.  
_

 _It was easier when_ … he didn’t finish that thought. Didn’t say it out loud either, because that would have been the height of cruelty. It was a lie, anyway. It had not been easier when David had, for all intents and purposes, been dead. It had been… differently complicated.

Thomas went to pour a third glass of Scotch, reconsidered and took the last slug directly from the bottle. It got David’s attention, so he flicked his tongue against the rim of it, just for a split-second, just briefly enough to have plausible deniability. Back in the day, he would have winked. He didn’t now. _Tease him, ignore him. Reel him back in, push him away._ His heart was loud and clamorous and contradictory tonight. It was like being fifteen again, or no, scratch that, it hadn’t been… he hadn’t been nearly as complicated at fifteen. He’d only known that he found the boy who tutored him and sometimes came to watch the rugby exceedingly pretty, so he had brought him wildflowers plucked from the wayside, and cakes nicked from the kitchens, and helped carry his books and quizzed him for tests and took him along for nightly excursions and eventually asked to kiss him behind the shed for the cricket equipment.

For practice, he’d said. An experiment, David had said. It doesn’t have to mean anything, they’d both agreed. But then they’d actually managed, somehow, to bump their lips together, and Thomas had been thinking, _oh_ , and _yes_ and _so good_ and _I’m never doing anything else but this._ And eventually they’d had to admit to each other that the experiment only ever yielded a need for repetition, and they weren’t practicing _for_ anything. Neither of them actually desired a girlfriend like most of the other boys at Casterbrook. They desired each other, and kissing behind the shed for the cricket equipment, forever.

Oh yes, he had known at fifteen, at eighteen, at twenty that what they were doing could have seen them ruined, jailed, ousted from society. It had been a thrill to his young mind, a scandalous secret, an adventure. The glamour had worn off of it as they grew older, as their schoolmates had been settling down with wives and children and summer houses in the country and Thomas and David had still been sneaking around like teenagers, and ducking behind tiring pretenses and stupid rumours and Molly’s skirts for their safety. But that had just been what their relationship had naturally been like, a mundane fact of life, like taxes. And then there’d been the men with the pink triangles. The stark and final reminder that nothing about having to exist thus in secret was thrilling _or_ mundane, that the people around them genuinely wanted them _dead_.

But everything had gone to hell in a handbasket by then anyway.

Thomas set the empty bottle down, and it hit the table a bit harder than intended. His hand-eye-coordination was already slightly off. Besides that, his face was starting to warm, in a way that told him that it was about time to retire from drinking any more before things seriously went south. But he didn’t want to listen to the voice of reason tonight. He wanted to listen to the voice that said, _perhaps another glass._

So he traversed the room again and unearthed another bottle from the liquor cabinet. Walking straight wasn’t a problem - yet. Thomas wasn’t, usually, a man who drank to excess. But exceptions must be.

He had just poured the third glass when David asked, “What were you reading?”

Thomas gestured vaguely at the papers still spread out on the coffee table. “Tacitus. It’s Peter’s homework.”

“Oh,” David said. “Can I help you revise it? You seem tired, and I always had a hand for–”

“No,” Thomas cut in and poured the contents of his glass down his throat in one quick, decisive movement. “I told you before, and I was very serious: I won’t have you interfere with Peter’s studies.”

David sniffed. “But I am allowed to talk to him, aren’t I.”

“I suppose. I’m thinking about it.” Thomas looked from his glass back to David, meaning to give him a stern glare, but his eyes ended up roving, caught on the lines of David’s face, slightly unfocused. Here he was, back here, to touch. They’d kissed earlier, down in the lab, and maybe Thomas had hoped that after that, things would appear easier, clearer, somehow. But nothing was easier. He’d hoped, in secret, not even going so far as to articulate this to himself, that a kiss would put them back on an even keel, erase the clamour in his heart, restore tranquility to him. But nothing was tranquil. In fact, he hadn’t desired like this in a long time. He’d gotten one kiss, nowhere near enough to slake this suddenly recurring need.

“Come to bed with me,” he suggested.

“What?” David exclaimed with an incredulous little laugh. “You don’t trust me to go over your apprentice’s Latin homework, but you’d take me to bed?”

“Yes.” It really didn’t seem too extraordinary a stance to take. Peter’s studies were meaningful in the greater scheme of things. Sex wasn’t. “ _Personal_ is not necessarily the same as _important_.”

David shook his head. “I never could agree with you on that.”

To keep his hands and mouth occupied, Thomas poured himself another glass of Scotch, and downed it quickly. He was beginning to lose count of how many glasses deep he was. But that hardly mattered, because it made his lips tingle and it burned on the way down and the reasons why he didn’t want to touch David now were swimming out of focus.

“I had hoped it would be different,” David said, “our first time back home.”

Thomas couldn’t help it, he had to laugh. Our first time back home. “Davey,” he said, and it came out rougher than intended, “you’ve hoped for many things.”

“That’s true,” David murmured. “I suppose you were right, back then. It really was high time I faced reality.”

And this… was wrong, that David should suddenly talk like this. He’d much rather have naively optimistic David with his head stuck in a textbook than this broken, humbled version. _Reach, touch,_ Thomas’s heart whispered, and it was easy to forget why it was a bad idea. Thomas reached, put a hand on David’s cheek, ran the pad of his thumb across David’s sweet mouth. David shivered, lips opening in a gentle gasp. It felt familiar in a way Thomas had forgotten things could feel. Like reaching back across the decades, and it was a miracle that his fingers remembered, even ever so slightly, what it was like to touch David’s face.

Suddenly, something dark clawed at his chest, something frenzied, almost like panic, because how could this be, this ghost of a sensation, remembered from all these years back, how could it be that this was real, brought to life again? Suddenly he feared that if he closed his eyes, and opened them again, David might have disappeared. 

There was but one thing for it. Closer. More. Now their bodies were flush against each other, their lips crashing together, greedy, desperate, ungentle. Thomas fisted a hand in David’s hair - David whimpered so prettily against his lips - the other hand pulling up his shirt to get at the skin beneath, warm, living skin. The planes of David’s body pressed against his front, so familiar. His head spun, and fear threatened to drown him, choke him, so he sought salvation in David’s mouth, licking inside, kissing him frantically. Oh, he had been starved of this, and one kiss was not enough, so he kissed him another time, and another, and another.

“Mh… Thomas…” David disengaged, shifting back a little in his seat, a hand coming up to cup Thomas’s face. He sucked the index and middle finger into his mouth without hesitation.

“Thomas… shsh… you’re, this is not… you’re shaking, please stop, just a moment.”

David‘s other hand came to rest on Thomas’s shoulder, maintaining an arm’s length of distance between them, and it irritated Thomas, being so pushed away. Was he shaking? Maybe. But what did that matter? He could figure that out later, or never. He put a hand on David’s thigh and leaned forward against the hand gripping his shoulder, trying to chase David’s lips. “Now you’re complaining, Davey?”

“No, but…” David got up. Thomas, attempting to follow him, swayed into him, and steadied himself by in turn holding onto David’s shoulders. Whoops. Hopefully that looked like he’d meant to do that. 

“See, you’ve been drinking,” David said. “It’s not right. Let’s just get you to your bed, okay, and I’ll get to mine.”

“Or…” Thomas flicked David’s chest with his index finger to stress his point, “we’ll both go to my bed and stay there and see what develops.”

David shook his head softly. “Another time.”

“What makes you think I’ll offer another time?”

“We love each other.” David’s voice was steady, his gaze clear and firm, and it rubbed something raw within Thomas, something that did not like being so exposed at all. “That is the one thing I am still sure about, even in this new world, even after the war, even after… that place. We _will_ figure things out, but not tonight.”

Thomas laughed, a bitter, mirthless bark of a sound. Because he’d been impossible to David ever since he had returned, he hadn’t been able to contain any of the ugly slurry of his feelings, and he hadn’t been able to afford David even the slightest shred of courtesy, and yet here David was, talking about how they would definitely figure things out. “What if we don’t figure things out?” he asked, breaking contact, disentangling his limbs from David’s. “What if I don’t want to? What if I won’t want to figure things out with the man who led us all to go to Ettersberg?”

David bowed his head, his eyes now hooded, dark. “I’d understand that.” He took a step back, in the direction of the door. “Do you want to break up?”

It was a genuine offer. David was offering.

_Do you want to break up?_

Had he taken another step back? He was so far away. So, so far away. It was too dark in the reading room and he was slipping away, away into the past again, no longer in reach to touch, and maybe it was really just the darkness of the reading room, maybe it was Thomas’s vision going black around the edges, and he trembled, and he ached,

and he was close again somehow, hands clawed into David’s sweater, his head buried in David’s shoulder, breathing in his scent in horrid, flat, hitching gasps.

“No,” he muttered, when he had the air for it. “No. No, no.”

“Songbird.” David sounded saddened, startled. The nuances of David’s voice, suddenly again familiar. There was a hand down his back, a hand in his hair stroking along the hairline, fingernails lightly scratching his scalp in a way he’d forgotten he found comforting. David hadn’t forgotten. “Oh… Thomas. You’re not okay.”

It ought to have been ridiculous, _you’re not okay_. As much was evident. But he couldn’t recall ever hearing it said, and it did something to him, and he held on to David’s shoulder like it was the only anchor in a sea of chaos, and he didn’t know how to ride this out, so he clung and waited and the tide tossed him about and did not recede.

“I forgot what you smelled like,” he heard himself say, detachedly. “The sheets in your room lost your scent eventually, and then all your clothes did because I wore them, and it almost broke me a second time, because I was losing more and more of you with each passing day and you weren’t coming back to renew anything. I forgot what it was like to touch you. The sound of your voice. The feel of your _signare_. The feel of your _hand_.”

“Seventy years,” David whispered. “I’m so sorry… I didn’t understand.”

 _No,_ Thomas wanted to say, _no you damn well didn’t,_ but he couldn’t. All he could do was cling to David’s shoulder and be battered by this, wrenched open by his care. Walking wounded.

“But I’m here now,” David continued. “I will take care of things.”

Somehow, Thomas found his voice again. It sounded strange to his own ears. “What things? What will you take care of?”

David looked at him, so earnestly it hurt to observe. “Anything needs must,” he said. “You.”

“But I am not for taking care of,” Thomas said. He didn’t know why he said it. Except… _here is my duty, mine, alone. Do not suggest you will relieve me. There was never any relief. There will never be any relief._

“Oh, songbird, but aren’t you?” David asked. “The others, they all went into the country and attempted to heal, or they are at rest forever. When did you rest?”

“I…” Thomas tried to gather his resolve, put the walls back into place that David was wearing down with all these questions, and he found he couldn’t. He felt… once, as a child, he had watched Mother dispel slugs from her rose garden by pouring salt on the creatures. He, then five years old, had burst into tears at the sight of the slugs squirming impotently to get away as they succumbed to the fatal substance, and he’d tried to wrestle the jar of salt from his mother’s hand when tears wouldn’t stop her, and received a thorough scolding for it. He felt like one of those slugs now: soft and unwitting and utterly defenseless before an almighty fate. Tomorrow, the walls would be back in place. Tomorrow he would be The Nightingale again, unapproachable and aloof. But not tonight. Tonight he was soft and lonesome and powerless and there was nothing but the dark of the reading room, the alcohol making swirls in his head, and his boyfriend, sweetly returned from the dead.

“I… don’t,” he said. “I didn’t.”

“That’s not right,” David said. His hand was still in Thomas’s hair, stroking in a way that was infinitely soothing, blunt fingernails against his scalp. “That shouldn’t have been asked of you.”

 _Well, life doesn’t care about 'shouldn’t'_ , Thomas wanted to say, _it simply was asked of me, even when I was in so deep I could barely lift my head they were asking it of me, and not least because you weren’t there, because you ran away,_ but what he ended up saying, murmuring into David’s jumper rather, was “They needed me.”

David snorted. “Command? You never–”

Thomas shook his head. “The lads did.”

“Ah, yes. Your ducklings.” The smile was audible in David’s voice.

It had been a joke between them, Nightingale’s Ducklings. The younger and younger recruits they had kept sending down from London in the latter years of the war. Fresh-faced youths, barely of age, looking like they’d been playing dress-up in their uniforms. Some of them scared, some of them vigorous and over-eager to prove themselves to the more seasoned veterans, most of them now dead. Thomas had tried, whenever possible, to do his utmost to protect the boys, but tossed up against a place like Ettersberg, there had been no protecting anybody.

“And how are the chaps anyway? The survivors? I’m assuming you’re still in contact with them all?” David chuckled. “Oh goodness, they must be old men by now!”

“I’d like to go to bed now,” Thomas said. 

“Hm? Oh of course, of course.” Getting what he wanted, David was quickly distracted from his previous line of inquiry. _I do know him so very well,_ Thomas thought disjointedly as David wrapped an arm around his waist. On autopilot - even still! - Thomas slung his arm across David’s shoulders in return. They’d done this on unnumbered pub crawls, then later on similarly unnumbered battlefields. “There we go, ay-up, Captain.”

“I can walk,” Thomas protested, even as his head dropped back onto David’s shoulder. Really, he wasn’t that inebriated. Slightly tipsy, that was all.

“In a straight line?” David questioned.

“That _won’t_ be a problem.”

David sighed airily and nosed into his hair. “Let me have this, Thomas.”

* * *

Thomas tried again, when he had David in his bedroom kneeling before him (between his legs) at the foot of the bed, as David took his hand and unbuttoned his cuff and pressed one chaste kiss to his wrist. It made Thomas shudder, being so kissed, and seconds later he was reaching almost blindly for David’s face again, tugging him up, crashing their mouths together, wanting David’s lips on his, wanting David’s lips all sorts of places. But David broke the kiss and smiled at him, a smile full of such love as he didn’t deserve, and didn’t budge, even when Thomas slipped his right shoe off and ran his foot along David’s inseam.

David gasped, and twitched a little, but he said, “No, songbird. Another time.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Thomas said, which he hadn’t meant to, in a strange, rough voice that sounded much more 1940s than 2010s. Why on earth had he said that? Tomorrow he would remember all the very good reasons for not recommitting to anything where David was concerned. But tonight he was wanting, nothing else.

“I hope so,” David replied as he got up and smiled sadly, because oh, he knew those reasons too. He bent down one last time and ran his thumb across Thomas’s cheekbone, and kissed him again, a soft, small peck, a kiss goodnight. “Sleep well.” 

And he went back to his own room.

Thus bereft of company and the warmth of David’s body, Thomas groaned and pressed the heel of his hand into his crotch. Somewhere along the way wanting had become needing, and now he was alone with it. As always, alone with it. 

For a split-second he considered going and getting his entertainment elsewhere. Peter was in tonight, some few rooms over, perhaps this would be the night he finally tried to… but no, that thought was, as always, firmly tamped down, because Peter’s pregnant girlfriend was a woman of formidable power, and besides, there was never any use to any attempts upon the tragically heterosexual. He hadn’t considered Peter in such a manner at all lately, what with David around again, so perhaps this was one of these rare problems that solved themselves. 

His pool of potential applicants already depleted, Thomas took himself in hand. He hadn’t felt the need to do this in a while, and didn’t expect to last any time at all. As if a tightly locked floodgate had been opened, his mind conjured up images of David, things he hadn’t let himself think about in decades and decades lest the grief make him lose his mind for good. But the memories were no longer tinged with grief _now_ , because David was _back_ , and his mind delighted in recalling again the lines and dips and curves of David’s body and being able to do so freely, without the crushing sadness of permanent loss.

David before the war, softer then, solid, (he still was too thin now) no shell-shock dulling the light in his eyes. The sensation of tracing the dip of David’s hips through the soft fabric of one of his jumpers, the hard line of him in his slacks, backing him up against a bookshelf in the mundane library (so risqué but _oh_ , so thrilling) and listening to his breath deepen, sticking a hand down his pants, being greeted with the velvet heat of David’s cock, watching David’s face pinch and, eventually, release, going from biting his lips raw and red in an effort to not be overheard to slack-mouthed pleasure. David’s mouth just now, so pink and slick from their kissing, David kneeling between his legs and where that might have gone, in another, ideal world. While Thomas very much loved giving oral, he knew with David the receiving was just as sweet. He imagined them taking a night and just alternating sucking each other off until they collapsed in bone-deep, delicious exhaustion into dreamless sleep, and he felt his hips cant upwards into his fist with renewed need, and gripped himself just this side of too tight. _Yes, god,_ he thought, _my David._

At about this point Thomas noticed himself crying, a clear stream of tears down his cheeks, but they felt cathartic, so he left them. His heart was light. He had done this once or twice just after the war, brought memories of David to the forefront of his mind for this express purpose, simply exhausting any possibility of chasing a few seconds of relief from it all. The resulting crash and burn and slew of self-disgust when he’d inevitably remembered his boyfriend (supposedly) blowing his brains out in this very building had never been pretty. (He’d considered turning to drinking to excess then for a bit, until Molly had put her foot down regarding that.) Tonight he knew there would be no crashing and burning, because David was just down the hall, hale and whole and sleeping the sleep of the less-than-innocent. 

He had flagged a bit, with the crying, so Thomas sped up his hand and remembered that week they’d spent at David’s father’s hunting lodge, the two of them alone in the empty countryside, free to share the bed in the master bedroom, free to wake next to each other and make early-morning love unhurriedly, free to prepare breakfast in the nude and take it back to bed. They’d been younger then, and made love almost unflaggingly, pausing intermittently to eat and generally observe life’s basic needs, only for this moment or that to start another round, and before they’d known it they’d come together again, fevered with need for each other, drunk on all this unobserved alone time.

 _My Folly now,_ Thomas thought disjointedly, _we can do it in every room we never used to dare to,_ and he released another moan as he felt himself cresting, and the back of his head hit the headboard with a _thunk_ as he came, came and came with the force of his lonely years, eking the moment out and stroking himself to overstimulation, until his hips twitched and his whole body shook with the pleasure-pain of it. And if he fell asleep in the wet patch before he could gather the resolve to get up and fully undress, half in _déshabillé_ with himself still in hand, it certainly was undignified, but there was no one there to witness it.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thomas comforts. Peter listens. David steals his boyfriend's car.
> 
> We're back to Peter's POV! But there will be more interludes. Takes up right where the last chapter left off.

Halfway through the night, I was woken by a scream.

It had me sitting up straight in bed, disoriented, heart beating a little too fast, thinking at first that I’d dreamt the noise, whatever it had been… then someone screamed again, somewhere within the Folly. 

I had my slippers on and was out the door within two seconds of the second scream.

As I cast a werelight and let it float an inch above my palm, I proceeded, slowly and carefully, down the empty hallway. I was grateful for the warm, steady, non-horror-movie-esque glow that my werelight provided, otherwise this would have been creepy. Of course, the part of my mind that wasn’t just primed on observing wondered who had screamed and why. Someone needed my help somewhere out here and I didn’t know anything further about the situation, but so help me I was going to be there.

Then, beyond one of the many closed doors in this hallway, I heard something. A rustle, a… whimper? I paused.

The door was nothing to me. Just another disused bedroom, like many on this floor. I turned the handle. It wasn’t locked.

The air in the room smelled like Molly had freshly cleaned here, readying it for its new-old inhabitant. In my werelight’s glow, I saw a shape in the bed against the far wall, writhing, flailing, making these little whimpers. I took a step inside.

“No,” said a voice in my back.

I full-body flinched. I’m not proud of this buy I almost shrieked when a hand fell onto my shoulder. I spun around.

“I know how to handle this,” Nightingale said. He was still fully dressed, his suit rumpled like he’d slept in it. His face was milk-pale in the darkness, and he smelled of booze. 

“If you’re sure, sir?” I whispered. For a moment, as he passed me by in the doorway, we were very close. I held my breath as he breathed a cloud of alcohol onto my face.

“I am. Go back to bed, Peter.”

But I stayed standing where I was and watched as Nightingale knelt by the bed, plunged a hand into the multiple thick blankets piled onto there and muttered something I couldn’t quite catch. The flailing, writhing, blanketed shape quieted for a moment, and Mellenby’s curly head shot up from his nest. He was panting, gasping, shaking and clutching the blankets to him.

“It’s…” he gasped. “I’m…”

“You’re home,” Nightingale murmured. “It’s over now.”

Mellenby grabbed onto his hand like a lifeline. “I was back at… that place.”

Nightingale nodded, this wasn’t surprising or new to him. “Ettersberg. Yes. I dream of it too.”

Mellenby shuddered. “You do? Even all these years later?”

“Yes,” Nightingale said grimly, “Even all these years later.”

“So this never… never goes away? It never stops?”

“It hasn’t for me, not substantially.” Absentmindedly, it seemed, Nightingale wiped a bead of sweat off Mellenby’s brow with his thumb. “I wish I could tell you something more encouraging.”

“It was so cold,” Mellenby whispered. “I’m just… so cold.”

“Mmh. We’ll get you warm.” Nightingale sat down on the bed and rearranged them so that he could pull David into his arms. This accomplished, he looked back up at me.

“Still here, are you?” he asked me quietly.

 _Sorry_ , I mouthed and got away, not wanting to intrude any further.

I got a glass of water in the kitchen and went back up to my bedroom. On the way past Mellenby’s room, I peered once more, just for a second, through the cracked door. I could see the two of them nestled in bed like kids at a sleepover, I could hear their whispered words, too low for me to make out. 

* * *

We didn’t talk about any of that at breakfast. Nightingale sat with his coffee and his crossword as usual, and if he hid a few yawns behind his hand, no one mentioned it. Molly served food. David had availed himself of Nightingale’s phone and was now tinkering with it with the fervor and enthusiasm of the true neophile. Periodically he would ask a question like “What does this button do?” and Nightingale would glance over and say something to the effect of “I don’t know, I never use that one.”

After a few such exchanges, Mellenby put the phone down with a put-upon expression. “Really, Thomas,” he said, “I can’t believe you have this… this wondrous gadget of near-infinite uses at your convenience and never ever figured out how to fully utilize it.”

Nightingale pointedly rustled his newspaper. “I will utilize it when and if it becomes necessary. Otherwise I don’t see a reason to waste time on it.”

Mellenby sighed. “But I have so many questions!”

“Look, why don’t you have Peter show you,” Nightingale suggested and went back to the newspaper, skimming the headlines and muttering something about “god-damned Cameron”. 

“Why do you read the Torygraph, anyway?” I asked.

“Crossword’s stellar, unfortunately,” Nightingale said and gave me a get-on-with-it hand gesture.

I went out in the hallway to phone Bev first and foremost, and when I had made sure she didn’t need anything from me right this second (she told me to stop fussing but, hey, she was _pregnant_ ) it seemed like my morning would be devoted to explaining cellphones to David Mellenby.

I ended up taking him into town and out of Nightingale’s hair. His opposition to us hanging out at all seemed to have subsided a bit, maybe he’d stopped suspecting that we’d conspire to do science behind his back. Or perhaps he just secretly wanted to have a lie-down with his hangover. One of these two.

“I want modern clothing,” Mellenby proclaimed to my surprise. “All of my things look like… well, like they’ve been mouldering in a wardrobe for seventy years, give or take. And I would love to avail myself of an… intelligent phone.”

“A smartphone?” I had to grin. “You’re going to need money for that.” I wondered if he had money, and what had happened to it after his “death”. Had Nightingale taken care of it? Had anyone? Had David had family?

The question became void when Mellenby said, “Thomas gave me, um, this,” and held up the Folly’s credit card. God and Nightingale and possibly but not definitely the commissioner only knew how much was on that. “He told me to just take whatever I need.”

I couldn’t help myself, I let out a wolf-whistle. “The man does love you.”

Mellenby ducked his head, a shy smile spreading involuntarily on his face. “I should hope so.”

I expected he wanted to head on over to Savile Row and get himself a wardrobe of bespoke suits true to the Nightingale way. It turned out what David Mellenby wanted was to dress precisely like everyone else on the street. He seemed drawn to comfy jumpers, cardigans and slacks and seemed to consider dumb novelty t-shirts that said things like “Don’t trust atoms - they make everything up” the height of wit and comedy.

We also got him a phone. He badgered an employee into explaining everything to him, but his friendly and unbridled enthusiasm made it near-impossible to be annoyed by him. I filmed the exchange on my own phone and sent it to Nightingale captioned _“Let your bf loose in the electronics store”._

 _“Bf?”_ Nightingale texted back. _“Ah. ‘Boyfriend’. Indeed. God help us all.”_

As morning morphed into noon, I got us coffee just to see how Mellenby people-watched. It amused me in a weird way how he kept making googly eyes at the stores, streets, cars and people around us. He seemed to be taking the whole seventy-years-later thing remarkably well - scratch that, he seemed to be taking to it with a verve that surprised me. Probably because I was used to Nightingale, who tended to keep the modern world at arm’s length (that is, until he didn’t). At times, Mellenby simply looked astonished, or like he was wanting to ask questions but didn’t know how to best go about it. At other times I watched him smile like a kid in a candy store. I wasn’t going to ask, but then Mellenby ordered a giant unicorn-glitter-frappuccino-concoction because he saw it advertised on a billboard and “it piqued his curiosity”. Nightingale, when forced to enter a coffee shop at all, usually ordered a no-nonsense black coffee accompanied by that testy old-person-face of someone with opinions about and personally offended by the Starbucks menu.

I guess I just couldn’t help constantly comparing the two of them.

“Are you… alright with all this?” I asked him, feeling a bit hesitant to lance that boil, but curiosity winning out.

“I’m… yes, alright, I think.” He smiled at me. “This drink is… interesting.”

“Sure,” I said and waited for him to volunteer more information.

“To be honest, sometimes it all feels like a dream,” Mellenby produced. “Like a journey down the rabbit hole. I keep expecting someone to pinch me, and it’ll still be 1945. Of course things are… different, and strange to me. London has changed considerably. But then again, last I saw it, half of it was in ruins. Now there’s all these exciting new buildings, and different cars, and there are so many… well…” He looked at me and started visibly floundering, and I began to suspect what came next. “There are people on the… street who are… that is to say, there’s many…”

I decided to do the charitable thing and release him from his struggle. “Got a bit more colourful since the 40s, huh?”

Mellenby, too, coloured - as pink as his unicorn drink. “I don’t wish to offend. I… Thomas was the one who always got around within the… colonies, I rarely…”

“There’s no more empire,” I threw out, just to see how he’d react. Hugh Oswald had described him as very concerned with the fading British Empire, while Nightingale had claimed him uninterested, and I was wondering which one it was and whether I could still like him as a person after this.

“Oh boy!” Mellenby exclaimed. “That’s a big change.” And that seemed to be it.

“So you’re really just… adjusting alright.” It seemed almost too easy.

Mellenby shrugged. “I suppose so. There was… not much left for me to miss in 1945, that probably helps. And a part of me sees this as a chance, you know? Under normal circumstances I might never have experienced this new, enlightened era as I am now doing. Ah well, it keeps me from thinking about the war.”

I nodded knowingly. Distraction. Well, that sure was one explanation.

“I’m just glad I don’t get overstimulated, like I saw some of the lads do, immediately after our return from… that place. Just the nightmares, and that… unfortunate episode just yesterday. I, um… did apologize for that, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Parts of that moment were a bit of a blur, to be honest. He’d tried to attack, I’d snapped to defense, Nightingale had rushed in, then I’d told Mellenby about gay rights. All’s well that ends well. “No one got hurt, so… it’s fine.” After some thought process had gone into that, I added, “You’re going to want to get help for that, though.”

Mellenby made a face. “Help.”

“Therapy’s good now. I do it. They don’t just tell you to get up and show some backbone anymore, it really helps.” I looked at his wrists. He’d put on a silver-grey cardigan to cover the inhibitor cuffs, even with the warm weather out. “These cuffs can’t be a permanent solution.”

“No indeed.” He picked at them beneath his sleeves. “Most of my work relies on me using my magic in the lab. I cannot continue on like this. I get why Thomas sees the need, but I wish there were another way.”

“There is.” For a moment, I felt the impulse to pat his shoulder. I contained it. “Get better.”

Mellenby sighed. “Get better… easier said than done. You know, what with so much time having passed, for Thomas, in relation to me, I would have assumed I’d find him… having gotten better. But apparently… not.”

Oh, no. He wanted to talk about Nightingale.

I wasn’t about to snitch on my boss to his significant other, so I said, “He gets on alright.” Personally, I’d been happy to believe that, but then I’d started having… doubts. Lately. 

Mellenby fiddled with the lid of his plastic cup, glowering down upon it like it had done him a personal injustice. “Does it truly just stay like this? Has he not found anything in all these years that helps?”

I shrugged. I don’t think Nightingale has ever gone anywhere near a therapist, and I’d much rather stick my foot in a bear trap than suggest it to him. “As coping goes, I guess he’s the expert. I mean, he did build that memorial wall.”

Mellenby cocked his head at me. “Thomas built a what now?”

* * *

“It’s a bit of a drive,” I said. “And I’ve only done it once. And the roads may be different than what you’ll remember.” We were exiting the coffee shop, proceeding down the road with the great, purposeful steps of people planning an endeavor. Really, that plan was still stuck in its earliest stage: We want to get somewhere, how do we pull it off?

“I’m sure between the two of us we’ll manage to find Casterbrook,” Mellenby said. “Have you got a car?”

“Yeah, but it’s at Bev’s house.” When Mellenby gave me a blank look, I explained, “Beverley Brook. My girlfriend.”

“Ah.” He nodded. Mentally, he seemed to cross me off a list. (Or was I imagining that?) I gave him three seconds… two… one…

“Like the river?” he asked.

I smiled. I couldn’t help it. My face just does this thing nowadays when Bev is discussed. “Yeah, like the river.”

“The Beverley Brook didn’t have a deity in my day.” 

“A lot is different. What I’m getting at is my car’s halfway across town.” 

“How long has your girlfriend been around? If you don’t mind me asking. Do you think she might talk to me?”

“I don’t know. Let’s cross the rivers when we get to them. About the car though.” Was this what dealing with me was like? All the questions and digressions? How had Nightingale not imploded under the strain of there now being two of us?

“Yes, yes. Well, why don’t we just nip on back to the Folly and take Thomas’s Jaguar?” Mellenby suggested.

“The Jag?” I frowned. “I don’t know. He gets… territorial about it. And he is my boss.”

“Not mine,” Mellenby said.

I thought back on how livid Nightingale had been with David, that deep-seated rage I’d never seen in him before. And below that, other, even deeper shit lurked. “You’re not even a bit scared of him?”

“Hah!” He actually genuinely laughed. “Before he was my Captain, he had already been my boyfriend for a good long while. I’ve seen Thomas with his a–” He cleared his throat. “I’ve seen Thomas in just an array of posit- of situations. I’m not intimidated by him.”

* * *

He left a text.

 _Thomas,_ it ran, _took the Jag. Will bring it back, presumably, by dinner. I love you. This, by the way, is David on the cellular phone._

What with the frequency with which Nightingale looked at his phone, or rather the lack thereof, he probably wouldn’t see the text until we were already back. Which explained why he didn’t immediately call both of us demanding to know where on earth we were taking his car. Still, he’d probably flip when he noticed the Jag was gone.

Between the two of us and Google Maps (Mellenby oohed and aahed accordingly) we did manage to find Casterbrook. The building looked about as I remembered it, perhaps a bit more overgrown.

“Oh, it’s desolate!” Mellenby exclaimed, looking at it with a facial expression bordering on horror. To me, it seemed fine - well, not _fine_ , it really was kind of dreary, but it hadn’t been left to decay. Clearly, Nightingale still invested in the school’s upkeep. Then again, to someone who had known the place well-trimmed and teeming with activity, ‘desolate’ was probably accurate.

We walked across the grounds, the way Nightingale had shown me back then that led to the secret side-entrance. Mellenby was apparently reminiscing.

“Over there were the cricket and rugby fields,” he said, pointing. “That… is where I first laid eyes on Thomas.”

“Hallowed ground,” I said with a tired smile.

“I… suppose.” He lowered his head, but wasn’t deterred for long. “He was… well, in retrospect he was fifteen. But to me then, it seemed impossible that anyone should be so graceful. I had no idea why I was feeling so deeply about it. Oh my, the front door seems to be locked. And me without my magic. Do you know a lock-breaking spell?”

“Won’t need one. Nightingale showed me how to get into the night gate.”

“Ah, the night gate.” Mellenby beamed. “I remember when Thomas first asked me to meet there and go to the pub with him and his friends. No one had asked me before, and I was so nervous. I thought probably it was going to be a one-time occasion, a token of gratitude, perhaps, for my tutoring him, and that surely Thomas Nightingale wouldn’t want little old me along with all his big popular friends. It turned out he genuinely just- oh, I am boring you.”

“Eh, not boring me.” I definitely filed ‘big popular friends’ away for further examination. Bit of a jock, my guv’nor, apparently.

“But you don’t actually want to hear these stories, do you?” Mellenby lowered his head, and it was like kicking a puppy. He probably hadn’t ever talked to anyone about this, what with the subject matter being so very illegal at the time. Now that he could, though, the stories seemed to just be pouring out of him, like he couldn’t help himself, like he was desperate to share them all as soon as humanly possible. I wondered what it had been like for him, having this relationship that had been so very meaningful to him, and not ever being able to mention it. I wondered how on earth he hadn’t exploded with it.

“No, no, I do,” I said. “It’s just… he _is_ my boss and all.”

I let us inside through the notorious night gate. It had been a while since I’d been shown the spell for the door, and Mellenby remembered it but couldn’t cast, but we managed together. It was as dark in there as I remembered it being, and I cast a werelight to light the way. Mellenby cooed when he saw it.

“It’s fascinating,” he said, “your budding _signare_. I never thought I’d see the day Thomas took an apprentice.”

I didn’t quite know what to say to that. But before I could even think of an answer, Mellenby was off again touching the walls and sighing at the many and varied _vestigia_ within the old building. “It’s all so present and yet so far away,” he said. “They never ever reopened the school?”

“Who would’ve done it? Who’s _they?_ There’s only Nightingale.”

Mellenby started to say something - and snapped his mouth shut. After a few moments in which we just walked silently, he asked, “Then why do we even still own the building?”

‘We’, in this case, I assumed meant the Folly.

Sentiment, would have been my first answer. Nightingale simply hadn’t borne the thought of selling his old school very well, and had felt overwhelmed to be in charge of a decision of such magnitude. He’d told me as much. So he had simply avoided thinking at all about it, keeping the whole thing at arm’s length again - a common tactic, I was beginning to notice, with Nightingale.

“Need somewhere to keep the memorial, I guess,” was what I said.

And then it was before us, the memorial. I let my werelight grow larger, brighter, and sent it up towards the ceiling where it illuminated the near-endless rows of names, just like I’d done the first time I’d been here.

Mellenby’s mouth fell open as he spun around himself and stared up at those hundreds upon hundreds of names, stretching all the way up to the vaulted ceiling, all painstakingly carved into the wood paneling in that familiar, slightly blocky font. 

“Who all contributed to this?” Mellenby asked.

I was going to fit the realization that there had been only Nightingale left active in his head somehow. Eventually. Or so I hoped. “Nightingale all by himself,” I answered. “He told me there was no one else, and someone had to do it, or something.”

“Oh, Thomas,” David whispered. _“Oh, Thomas.”_

I kept quiet.

Mellenby opened his palm, to make a werelight alongside mine, I realized, and then when nothing happened put his hand down. 

“There are some good friends over here,” he said, pointing at a particular spot within the rows of names. There was a strain to his voice, and I feared he might cry again. “Horace Greenway, here, we were in the Latin tutoring club together. Roy Fitzgerald, my first apprentice. Didn’t make it out of Ettersberg. There’s Edward Cobb. He considered himself an empiricist, too. We had the most outrageous debates. Ballantine the third all the way over here, one of Thomas’s best friends, I never quite got on with him. There’s Pascal from the chess team, we had that funny nickname for him… and over here we have… oh… me.”

I did a double-take. But of course, Nightingale would have included David on here along with everybody else. Another casualty of Ettersberg, although indirectly. 

“He… he put me with my best friends,” Mellenby said, his voice now wavering. “And my apprentices. He knew… knew I’d want to be with them.”

“You had apprentices?” I tried, desperate to derail him from his oncoming crying fit.

“I had five apprentices,” Mellenby said, to my surprise. “I wanted at least double that. But, well, the war. Only one of them made it all the way through, but he dropped off the map practically as soon as the glider hit the ground. Oh, maybe Thomas will know what happened to him.”

I remembered Nightingale’s track record regarding other practitioners running around post-war, and had to stop myself from making a face. “I doubt it.”

“Geoffrey was his name. Geoffrey Wheatcroft. Is that… anything to you?”

I felt a chill. 

Geoffrey Wheatcroft had, of course, infamously gone on to found the Little Crocodiles.

If I recalled correctly, Nightingale had reacted with mild confusion when we had happened upon his name at last in our search for the Faceless Man. I shook my head. How he hadn’t gone completely spare was beyond me.

“You better talk to Nightingale about that,” I said. 

Mellenby huffed and crossed his arms, like something about that statement upset him, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe it was just my tone of voice. I’d probably sounded a bit foreboding. Well, I couldn’t have helped myself.

And then, with the dark and silent walls surrounding us, with the hundreds of carved names bearing witness, I asked him the only thing I could think to ask, “What was he like during the war?”

Mellenby gave me a long and strange look. He wasn’t always, this I had already learned, an expert at reading the room, but right now I knew he knew that I hadn’t asked about Wheatcroft. Then his eyes drifted off of me, to all the names on the wall, and from thence into a vague middle distance. Perhaps he was wondering what the men commemorated here would want him to say.

“Thomas was reckless,” he said.

I blinked.

That was not what I had expected.

He seemed to catch on to my astonishment, because he exhaled a long gust of a sigh and then deigned to elaborate.

“Thomas was a good CO,” he said, “Thomas lived for his men. His loyalty was to the lads under his command foremost. The brass, the objective, the enemy, the value of his own life, stipulations, orders… morals… Thomas lost sight of a lot when it came to ensuring the safety of as many of the men as possible. He got reckless, and from a certain angle it would look the same as getting ruthless. He would charge into situations…” 

Mellenby was getting choked up again. He wrapped his arms around himself and stared at the ground, his lids fluttering, he was obviously struggling to contain himself. I could do no more than stand by.

“He _was_ strong, I have to give him that. He was a keen strategist. Most of the time, he judged his odds accurately. And he did win us some ground, you know. That’s why he was allowed to proceed with little more than a slap on the wrist. In combat, he would periodically forego orders, abandon his position… cross battlefields all by himself at full tilt with his shield up, firing at the Krauts like a maniac, just to get the men out faster. It _worked_ , was the thing. Doesn’t mean I didn’t die a thousand deaths in fear for him whenever he decided to do this.”

“ _Shit_ ,” I said. There was little else to say. I was trying to imagine the Nightingale I knew doing anything “like a maniac”, to imagine him without his ever-present composure. A bit of that had worn off recently with David’s return but it was still a long shot towards what he was describing.

“And he was valuable, as a Captain, as a practitioner, as a symbol. That’s why command let him alone. He never was disciplined in any meaningful way… never court-martialed… and neither was I, come to think of it. I suppose command found me valuable also, or Thomas was shielding me in some way. Some things were certainly kept off the record, some things I assume command never heard of.”

“Now hold on.” This was beginning to sound less than savory. “Court-martialed?”

“Oh yes.” Mellenby made a bitter little sound. Maybe it was supposed to be a laugh, I honestly couldn’t tell. “In the later years of the war, Thomas was flirting with a court-martial near-constantly. Going in, there was an attempt to do things by the book as much as was possible. But being in the field, it wears something down, you know, within you. Things started to fall by the wayside that we would never have thought ourselves capable of abandoning. Just… the bloody fascists. The god-forsaken scum.”

He clenched his fists. The sudden anger was jarring to me - I’d seen him annoyed by now, or unnerved, but never truly furious. Now I first realized, really realized with all my brain that he was a veteran. 

‘Veteran’… I’d taken it to mean ‘person who needs care’. And of course it still meant that. But it also very much meant ‘retired soldier’, with all that concept entailed. Here was a man who had made his living in slaughter.

“They made us worse people, and that I cannot forgive. I heard Thomas say once that they had waived their humanity when they elected Hitler. And he was right, he was right! Gracious, did I hate the Germans. Do hate them. Then Ettersberg…” He grit his teeth. His voice quieted, dulled again. “Ettersberg vindicated us. Showed us what exactly it was we’d been fighting. But, it also confronted us with our own shortcomings. Showed us that we were complicit. That I… was complicit.”

He was beginning to tremble now, first his hands, then his whole body. “And my research started it all in the first place… my theories… I…”

Yeah, I had to get him out of here, or at least out of his head. I called back my werelight and, very carefully, touched his arm and led him out of the room, back into the light.

“Hey, listen,” I said as we walked, “I’ve changed my mind. Why don’t you tell me the story of how you met Nightingale after all…”

* * *

We walked back to the car in a somber mood. Of course you could never really feel chipper coming back from such a place. I tried to imagine Nightingale creating the memorial, just him and his carving tools in that vast, dark, empty room by himself. From what he’d told me, it had always seemed like he’d done this first thing after leaving the hospital. It was the kind of mental picture that could drive anyone to depression.

Mellenby, too, was not a happy camper. He looked pale, drawn, he wasn’t trembling anymore, but I could see that not having a total breakdown just now had taken a lot out of him. He dropped heavily into the Jag’s passenger seat, all but collapsing into it.

“Aw, man,” I said. “Maybe we shouldn’t have come here.”

“No,” David disagreed. “It was right for me to see this.”

“Still, Nightingale will have our heads for taking off with the Jag.” I was trying for some levity, but on the other hand, the reaction Nightingale might have to our impromptu Jag theft genuinely worried me.

Mellenby shook his head, as if wanting to dislodge the cobwebs of his almost-breakdown. “Let me deal with Thomas,” he said tiredly. “Why do you always call him that, anyway?”

What was he talking about now? “Call him what?”

“Nightingale.”

“It’s his name?”

“No, I know Thomas. He would’ve offered you first-name-basis three days into your apprenticeship.”

He was spot-on in fact. It probably hadn’t been three actual days after I’d started working for him that Nightingale had suggested I call him Thomas, but it was somewhere around that mark. It hadn’t panned out, and he hadn’t offered again since. 

“He did offer,” I said, “but I didn’t take him up on it. It felt too weird. I mean, he’s… he’s Nightingale, and he _is_ my _boss_. We’re not… friends.”

Mellenby laughed tiredly, sweeping a hand across his eyes. “I can’t believe I ever thought you were sleeping with him.”

* * *

We were back on the road on our way back to London when he picked up the thread of that conversation again.

“It’s probably just because I’ve known him for so long, but it’s strange to think on Thomas commanding that kind of respect. It seems so… unlike him to be so distant.”

I felt it appropriate to ask about the war again.

“That was different,” Mellenby said. “It’s poison for troop morale, having a combat leader who is too distant. It’s been a tightrope walk, certainly, for Thomas, because you can’t be overfamiliar with your men as the CO, but… comport yourself too aloofly in the field and the men may never connect with you. Company cohesion, the men’s emotional and psychological needs, those all fell under Thomas’s purview. He was mother and father to the youngest recruits out there. Besides, we experienced so much alongside each other, it made us stick together like glue.”

I for one couldn’t imagine a Nightingale who was anything but emotionally distant and removed from the world around him. Like he’d spent all his caring in the war, I thought, just used it all up and now there was almost none left. I was certain that he cared for Molly, and reasonably convinced that he, in a way, also cared about me, as far as our professional relationship was concerned, and he tried, he did. I remembered a short while ago, when I’d gotten myself suspended after the whole Chorley fiasco, and Nightingale had given me the nudge that had led to me seeking out therapy. He cared in these short bursts, triggered by external events, like a long-derelict bulb giving out random flickers of light, interspersed by long darknesses.

What a glum mental image that was.

“I sort of assumed he was like this back then,” I told Mellenby. “What with the whole… you know… ‘the Nightingale’…”

Suddenly, Mellenby smacked his hand down onto the headboard in front of him. His face darkened rapidly, and he fixed the road before us with a grim scowl. “The Nightingale? People still call him that?”

Again, not the reaction I had been expecting. “Yeah?” I said. “Pretty much all the demi-monde calls him that. I heard from Hugh Oswald that it started as a war thing, though–”

“You spoke to Hugh about this?” Mellenby asked.

“I went and saw him a while ago.”

“Well, I don’t know what Hugh told you. But _the Nightingale_ is a miserable conceit, and it has brought nothing but pain and trouble unto Thomas. I dearly wish–”

I never found out what Mellenby dearly wished, because in that moment, my phone rang. I gestured at him to pick it up.

“It says on this here display-screen that someone named Guleed is calling.”

Oh. If Guleed was calling me, that either meant karaoke night was being rescheduled _again_ , or something serious was up. “Oh, yeah, um, can you take that? It’s DC Guleed, she’s from murder.”

Mellenby made googly eyes. “Women work in the police now?”

“Look, can you just take the call?”

To his credit, he immediately swiped to accept the call and held the phone up to my face as I drove. We were starting to make quite the little team.

“Hey,” Guleed said when I announced my presence to her. “Where are you at?”

Well, this didn’t sound like it was going to be about karaoke night at all.

“We’re, that is, I’m a little ways out of town. Just driving back.”

“Well, drive back faster, because we’ve got a body and we’re thinking it’s probably one of yours.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter has a moment. David is just going to go ahead and assume the game is afoot. Thomas has calmed down a bit, but that’s not going to last.

The West End address Guleed had given me turned out to be a theatre house, and not one of the more impressive ones. Posters up front were advertising a musical that I could vaguely remember watching a movie version of once, many years ago on a slow night. 

I squeezed the Jag into one of the few remaining parking spaces next to an array of squad cars from Belgravia. It didn’t seem like a good idea to take Mellenby in with me, but although we were relatively close, I still didn’t have time to drop him off back at the Folly, and my suggestion for him to wait in the car had about zero effect. He simply latched on to me as I entered the building.

We were barely past the ticket console and the first team of forensic suits when we were waylaid by Seawoll in all his glory. I wondered what about this fresh corpse necessitated DCI Seawoll being there, then it occurred to me that this was the first notable Falcon-related case that had cropped up since Lesley had shot Chorley and, for all intents and purposes, vanished. If there was even the slightest possibility of her involvement, that meant all hands on deck.

I gave him a nod, and tried to scope out the mood. “Sir.”

“Grant.” He didn’t go out of his way to give me a smile, but his scowl lessened slightly around the corners. Once upon a time, he would now have started bemoaning the necessity of my presence, but he just said, “We’ve got the body backstage, Sahra said it might be something for you. She got Thomas to come in, might already be around here somewhere.”

“Great.” If Nightingale was at the scene, it seemed like the consequences for Jag theft would be imminent and carried out embarrassingly in public. “I’ll go have a look.”

Seawoll had now spotted Mellenby behind me. “And who’s this?”

“He’s…” _Nightingale’s boyfriend._ “He’s a Falcon-specialist consultant affiliated with the SAU,” I said, pulling this completely out of my bum.

Seawoll looked at me and raised an eyebrow, communicating without words that he wasn’t buying this for a second. “And where did you dig him up?” he asked.

“Enchanted cave,” Mellenby said, stepping around me and insinuating himself into the conversation. “It’s a bit of a long story.”

Seawoll gave him a level glare. He had almost a whole head on Mellenby. “You know, I told Thomas about a thousand times, I don’t love you lot bringing civilians to my fucking crime scenes.”

Mellenby parried with a grin. “A civilian? No one has called me that in quite a while.” He profferred a hand for a handshake. “David Mellenby, Lieutenant First Grade.” He stared right back into Seawoll’s eyes. Next to the bulk of Seawoll, he looked like a bantam rooster. But his gaze held the weight of a world war.

 _Veteran_ , I thought again.

With a sort of grunt, Seawoll caved and shook the offered hand. “DCI Seawoll, Belgravia. You’re one of Nightingale’s, then?”

David nodded. “First and foremost.”

Seawoll rolled his eyes a bit.

“Sir, are we looking at a potential situation here with Lesley?” I asked, thinking it high time this conversation got back on track. There was a body somewhere here for me to look at, and _vestigia_ faded awfully fast.

“Eh.” Seawoll made a vague hand gesture. “We can’t dismiss the possibility at this point. But not every weird-bollocks-related crime in London can be Lesley.”

“But it doesn’t hurt to check?”

“Precisely. Now, Sahra can take you out back.”

Like the ninja she was most likely training to become, Guleed materialized at his elbow. She gave me a grin and a nod, and glanced curiously at David.

“You’re magical,” David told her as soon as Seawoll left us to it.

“Thanks,” Guleed replied. “I have a boyfriend.”

David clapped his hands and smiled beatifically. “Such a coincidence. I have one of those too. Even around here, I’m told.” He grew serious again. He got that look in his eyes that said clipboard and that I was beginning to recognize. “I mean to say, you’re _magical_ but not _Folly_. Who’s training you?”

Guleed looked from him to me. “Who’s that?”

“Nightingale’s boyfriend,” I said. This was Guleed, after all. And I didn’t miss the split-second of David flinching and then perking up and smiling brightly when he remembered it was okay now to openly be Nightingale’s boyfriend.

Guleed raised an eyebrow. “Is that so.”

“I have been with Thomas for a hundred years,” David proclaimed. And of course he would. Of course he’d count the years he’d spent in a magical coma, with Nightingale believing he was dead.

Guleed’s eyebrows threatened to disappear within her hijab.

“He really has,” I explained. “Holdover from his war… stuff.”

“And is this one also magically not growing older?”

Huh. I hadn’t had time to consider that before. “We’ll have to wait and see, I guess.”

“I definitely plan to research this phenomenon in depth,” David said eagerly. “Thomas and his reverse-aging, that is. The way that’s been neglected is a travesty. There’s been no evidence so far pointing us towards the theory that I myself might also be affected, but who knows? I won’t be able to tell until I discover the cause of this… affliction.”

It would be sad, I supposed, in a karmic way, the two of them getting this second chance, and then one of them starting to age past the other. But the world didn’t run on karma. Perhaps if David indeed found a cause and a way to explain it all… but that had to wait for now.

I nudged David’s side. “Can’t wait to get the clipboard out on your boyfriend, can you?”

He sputtered, blushing a bit, obviously not being used to being so publicly teased, but also _delighted_ by it.

“I don’t appreciate that kind of talk,” said a voice in our backs, “nor the bandying about of the term ‘boyfriend’.”

Nightingale had arrived on stage.

Quite literally on stage, too, and this time he had even lowered himself to putting a proper forensic suit on.

In crass dissonance to his words, he reached past me for David and gave him an almost absentminded kiss on the forehead. “Hello, love.”

Guleed stared. Mellenby lit up like a Christmas tree.

“Thomas!” he breathed.

Nightingale gave him that lopsided Captain-of-the-rugby-team grin (which, I would learn later, was very different from his Captain-in-the-war-effort grin). “Welcome to the 21st century,” he said, patting David on the back. David was glowing. “Oh, don’t cream yourself.”

My jaw joined Guleed’s on the floor.

Nightingale turned to me. “You are in a world of trouble,” he announced. “Both of you.”

“What, and no kiss for me, sir?” 

I had no idea where that had come from. I wanted to unsay it about as soon as it left my mouth. More than that, I wanted the ground to swallow me whole.

Nightingale, to his credit, only shook his head a little. David in my periphery looked… amused and entertained, and was maybe mentally putting me back on a list.

“We’ll talk about your absconding with my car at a later point. Right now, it seems high time we took a look at our victim.”

* * *

The victim had been found in a room we were told housed the theatre’s props, all cluttered shelves and musty cupboards full of… things. There were heaps of prop swords, cases stuffed with plastic jewelry, set furnishings piled up in corners. Forensics had already been through, and left their little stickers and varied evidence of their work everywhere. The victim was a white woman, I put her in her mid- to late fifties. She was a tall, slightly corpulent lady of forbidding hairstyle (it was short, wavy, stiff with spray and completely aubergine), dressed in a sort of flowing black blouse sporting a variety of frills and tassles. The cause of death seemed mundane enough: she had taken a blow to the back of the head with a blunt object.

I got to my knees and bent down to inspect her. The _vestigia_ took a few seconds to hit, and they were flighty, scrambled impressions. I felt the sensation of something… convex, and glass, and nice to hold in your hand, and then a piercing sting of… desire, of greed, a consuming need to _own_ something, so manifest and physical that it felt like an actual stab to my stomach.

I looked up. “Something… round. Made of glass, like a snowglobe? And there’s this… greedy feeling.”

Nightingale and David both nodded.

“Yes,” David said quietly. “I can feel them from here.”

“David’s always been good with _vestigia_ ,” Nightingale said. “Better than me.”

“Because I listen harder.” It carried the tone of an oft-repeated inside joke. But Mellenby had paled again and was looking faintly ill, trying to cast his eyes anywhere but at the body.

“Um, sir,” I muttered at Nightingale and discreetly inclined my head in David’s direction.

“Yes. Quite.” Nightingale gave me a nod - _thank you for bringing this to my attention_ \- and turned to David. “First corpse since Ettersberg, eh?”

David shuddered. The colour was draining from his face even faster now. “Please, don’t name that place!”

“Avoiding the name won’t help with anything. And you really shouldn’t be in here. Why did they let you in here in the first place? Come, let me escort you out.” Nightingale put a hand on David’s back and gently led him to the door. Looking back at me, he asked, “Will you be alright here?”

“Yep.” I nodded. Beyond the initial _vestigia_ check, there wasn’t much I could do with this corpse, anyhow, and I assumed it would quite swiftly be turned over to the tender mercies of Dr. Walid. I had another look around the room, but there was nothing to spot that would have been missed by your regular forensic tech.

There was no trace of the object that would have been used to deal the blow.

* * *

Our victim’s name was Deirdre Maxwell, 54 years of age, and she had been in charge of the props department at the theatre at which she was murdered.

At the time of the murder, as was later found once Dr. Walid had determined the exact time of Ms. Maxwell’s death, as it had been late in the evening and long past rehearsal had ended, only five people had been in the house with her. 

There was Howard Sheen, the theatre director. Ajinder Singh, the night porter and watchman. Darja Polunowskaja, the cleaning lady, Derrick Johnson, the janitor, and Cora Watley, an actress.

I went over their alibis as soon as we got back to the Folly and Nightingale had stopped sternly lecturing us about the Jag theft. The director had been in his office at the time of the murder, busy with bookkeeping. The actress had been in her dressing room going over her script one last time before going home, she claimed. The cleaning lady and janitor claimed to have been at their jobs in entirely different parts of the building, and the night watchman had spent most of the night in his cubby hole observing the front door. None of these alibis were good.

The front door had been under watch by the night guard and had not been entered by anyone up to the time of Ms. Maxwell’s death. None of the windows or skylights showed signs of forced entry or magical tampering. There were back and maintenance doors, each outfitted with a CCTV camera. Guess who had to sort through all the camera footage? That’s right, me, next to the metric ton of Latin homework Nightingale had seen fit to punish me with for letting David elope with the Jag.

The footage, once I was through with it, showed a great load of nothing. Nobody had entered or exited the theatre all evening until all present within the building at the time had gone home, except, of course, for Ms. Maxwell. Unless someone had gotten in in some way that we couldn’t of yet determine - a slim possibility - that narrowed our list of suspects down to the original five.

“A locked-room mystery,” David called it. He was hovering nearby as I sifted through the camera footage in the tech cave, superficially leafing through a new issue of Nat Geo he had badgered Nightingale into getting on the way home, in reality watching me. “I’m assuming you’re going to interview all five of them?”

“That’s none of your concern,” Nightingale reminded him. “Civilian.” A corner of his mouth quirked up as he said it, but still the message was clear. David had no place in the investigation.

“Don’t be like that, Thomas,” David pouted. “Who doesn’t love a good whodunnit?”

“This is a police matter, it’s not for you to play detective,” Nightingale said. “Besides which, the matter of ‘who done it’,” I could hear the scathingly sarcastic air quotes, “will most likely end up being handled by the colleagues at Belgravia. Our concern will be the whereabouts of the magical object.”

Mundane murderer, magical murder weapon, that was Nightingale’s theory. I for one thought it much too early to judge that, seeing as the murder weapon had inconveniently vanished.

But before that could even be determined, it was up to us to get the lowdown on Ms. Deirdre Maxwell.

* * *

We went to her flat first thing the next morning. The door was opened by a dejected-looking man in his late twenties or early thirties who turned out to be the victim’s son, and introduced himself as “Hey, I’m Logan.”

He was a white man with short, mousy brown hair, dressed in jeans and a dark-gray fleece jacket over a black t-shirt, probably random clothes he’d just thrown on this morning. He didn’t look like he’d gotten much sleep the previous night. He wasn’t looking to be the type who cried and emoted messily all over the place, I noted, but perhaps that would simply come later, once the immediate shock died down. Right now, he looked… dazed, I suppose. A common reaction in the face of sudden, jarring tragedy.

I was assuming Belgravia had already sent someone over the previous day to help him get over the worst of it, but it couldn’t hurt to play up that role. It wasn’t anything I was stellar at, but unfortunately the last several years had equipped me with some experience in the matter. Didn’t mean any of that ever got any easier.

“How are you holding up?” Nightingale inquired. I hadn’t thought he’d volunteer himself to step up for the role of supportive cop, but I was glad he did. 

“Like pure shite,” Logan Maxwell stated soberly. “But thanks for asking, guv.”

“We’re going to have to take a quick look around the flat,” I said.

“Why?” Logan Maxwell wondered. “My mother’s been murdered. Shouldn’t you be out looking for the killer? Surely there’s nothing in here for you to find?”

“This is pure procedure,” Nightingale told him. “We’ll be in and out of here within a minute, I’m sure. And of course a highly capable team of investigative forces is looking into finding our perpetrator as we speak. May we step into the kitchen and just have a short talk about all this?”

Ushering Mr. Maxwell on, almost herding him really, into his mother’s kitchen, Nightingale looked round at me and, with the slightest shift of his eyes, ordered me to search the other rooms. I nodded quietly and got to it.

Apart from the kitchen, there were three more rooms branching off the tiny, cramped hallway. A small bathroom (nothing at all special), Ms. Maxwell’s bedroom, a living room and what I assumed had been Logan Maxwell’s room once, but it became fairly obvious that he didn’t permanently live here any longer. Through the thin walls, I could hear Logan ask, “Do you mind if I just…?” to which Nightingale replied, “Oh, by all means, no, let me join you. I recently started again myself.” A lighter clicked twice, and soon I could smell smoke.

The living room was gaudy, chintz and little horrible knick-knacks everywhere. Not the fussy-old-lady sort, not porcelain dolls, you understand, but dream catchers, silk shawls, supposedly healing crystals and the like. It wasn’t anything I thought I had to worry about. Many people felt the need to spruce up their lives with a touch of magic, but most ended up completely off base. A light affinity for crystals wouldn’t do to explain Ms. Maxwell’s falling victim to a magical crime. Above the small TV, there was a cluttered bookshelf mounted to the wall, filled with romance novels and mediocre fantasy and some books that might have belonged to Logan as a kid.

“What is it that you do, Mr. Maxwell?” Nightingale asked politely one room over.

“I’m in insurance, actually, um, just started,” Logan Maxwell replied. There was a strained chuckle. “May I interest you in life insurance, guv?”

I heard Nightingale make a small, understated noise of genuine amusement. “You shan’t make a good living off of me in that respect.”

It seemed a common enough story. The quirky, hippie single mom and the son who rebelled by turning out as mundane and bougie as humanly possible. Perhaps this one’s grades hadn’t been sufficiently impressive for law school. I moved on to the bedroom.

“I’m not a grief counselor, no,” I heard Nightingale say as I opened drawers and found nothing at all of interest. “Merely someone of great personal experience with loss.”

“Good,” Maxwell replied. “I don’t want to be counselled. At least… not right now. The people from the murder team offered, but… I just need to… sit down and let it really sink in.”

“I understand all too well,” Nightingale said.

I opened up the door to what I assumed led into the second bedroom.

There was a little surprise there for me.

“If I may, Mr. Maxwell. Did your mother perchance do anything… unusual, strange, lately?”

“I told the other coppers, no. Not more unusual than always, I mean… I don’t know. Nothing comes to mind, really.”

I could practically see Nightingale’s immaculate, raised eyebrow. “Is that to say your mother did unusual things regularly?”

“Eh. She has this… _had_ this… this dumb hobby of hers. She always… I mean, it’s just this thing she’d do on the weekends. It’s nothing.”

I examined everything and made my way back into the kitchen. Maxwell was seated at the kitchen table, an overflowing ashtray in front of him. Nightingale, cigarette clenched between his teeth, was making tea.

“Um, sir?”

* * *

“A fortune teller,” Nightingale surmised.

We were looking at the setup in what had once been the second bedroom. Apparently, once Logan Maxwell had moved out, Deirdre Maxwell had remodeled his childhood bedroom to house her fortune-telling operation. There was a small table covered in a large, purple velvet shawl, and a deck of cards and other paraphernalia on that table. There was a ouija board mounted to a wall, another bookshelf on the opposite wall, this one filled with a different kind of literature. Tarot, spirit healing, seances, palm reading, something called ‘green witchcraft’. 

She had apparently recorded herself for the benefit of online customers, seeing as there was a laptop and camera rig positioned in a strategic angle to the purple coffee table.

And something… something was missing. I had never been in this room before, but there was a thought nagging at the back of my mind that something that should be here, that I’d expect to be here, was… missing.

“Yeah,” Logan Maxwell said sheepishly, “that was her thing. The Mysterious Madame Delilah. Load of bollocks.”

“You don’t think there might’ve been something to it?” I asked. I stole a glance at Nightingale, who ever-so-lightly made a so-so hand gesture.

“Nah,” Logan Maxwell said. “She always was on about some nonsense like that. Sure, people paid her for it, but… truth be told, I was embarrassed. The _Mysterious Madame Delilah_ ,” he repeated. “I don’t think she ever made any actual magic up in here.”

I ambled through the small room, examining the shelf once more, touching a chunky rose quartz, running my fingertips over the purple cloth that covered the table. And then it struck me: the smooth feeling of something under my hand, like glass, and a stab of desire.

 _Same vestigia,_ I mouthed at Nightingale.

Now I saw his raised eyebrow in action.

* * *

“I never met a fortune teller who wasn’t completely bogus,” he told me later, when we were walking back to the Jag. “Besides which, she had none of the literature on actual magic at her disposal. But if the last several years have taught me anything, it’s that there are… more than enough things I don’t know.”

I shrugged. “People come by magic in all sorts of ways.”

“Perhaps so,” he granted.

He had made a cup of tea for Mr. Maxwell, I thought. He had left his card with the man, “in case there’s ever anything out of the ordinary that occurs to you regarding the circumstances of your mother’s death”. He had smoked with him and apparently gotten chummy enough to be mistaken for a grief counselor. That was new, and it had started happening fairly recently, maybe, I suspected, as recently as David’s return. He seemed different, too. Something in his face, in the way he walked. Imperceptible to someone who didn’t know him well, but he seemed… more present, somehow. More involved with the world around him. Like something was waking up, or thawing out, that had been numb and silent for at least as long as I knew him.

 _The men’s emotional and psychological needs,_ Mellenby said within my short-term memory, _all fell under Thomas’s purview._

Just then, another thought clicked into place, and I knew what I’d been missing, up in the flat earlier. 

“No crystal ball,” I said.

“Pardon?” Nightingale asked.

“There was no crystal ball. What fortune teller doesn’t have a crystal ball? And the object we’re looking for is likely something round, smooth, made of glass. I’m sure you can deal a bit of a blow with a thing like that.”

Nightingale gave me a slight smile. “A thought worth keeping in mind,” he said in that tone of his that really meant _well done_ , and he gave me an appreciative sort of look, and I felt… well, I felt looked at. No one looks at you like Nightingale sometimes.

Just then, his phone rang.

He took it from his pocket and, peering at the screen, I could see it said ‘David’, and just that. If I’d been expecting heart emojis, I was cruelly let down.

“Aww,” I said, “it’s the boyfriend.”

“I told you his status is pending,” Nightingale told me sternly. “He’s not presently my boyfriend.” He accepted the call. “Hello, darling.”

If I’d had a drink just then, I would have spat it.

“Mh,” Nightingale said, in reply to something on David’s side. “Yes. You can tell Molly that I’ll definitely be home for dinner. I can make no such promises regarding Peter. Unless…?”

He gave me a questioning look, but I shook my head. I was going to have dinner at Bev’s. What with there being a new case now, things were bound to get busy for me, and I wanted to spend as much time with Bev as I could.

“Ah,” Nightingale said. “Apparently not. Well, I’ll be seeing you shortly. What? Oh. Yes, yes, I love you too, David, goodbye.”

He hung up and gave me a token annoyed look. There was no real force behind it. “Well, that was David.”

I grinned at him. “Cute,” I said. “Did you two make up?”

Nightingale shook his head. “Not in the slightest. What makes you think that?”

I gestured a bit awkwardly. “Well… just now, you said…”

“It was a statement of fact. I am angry with David - inordinately furious, really, at David - but that doesn’t mean I don’t also love him. My anger and my regard for him can coexist.”

That seemed weird to me, but also… so simple. He wasn’t having a big crisis about that part of things at the very least. Nightingale was frighteningly straightforward sometimes, and ready to accept all manner of things. And then I saw how he was trying very hard not to smile as he pocketed his phone, and how he kept looking around the place as we walked to the parking lot where we’d left the Jag with a kind of wonder, like he was seeing London with new eyes - and liking what he saw. And I thought, yeah, they’ll be alright.

And I felt… weird about that.

Not because I still felt horrified by the gay sex thing.

At least I dearly hoped so.

There was something else…

I didn’t know what.

But just then, for a split-second, I had felt almost… annoyed by David calling, because Nightingale and I had been having a _moment_ here goddamn it, and these moments of the two of us just doing something together without there being immediate combat had grown sparse of late, what with Lesley and Chorley. And I’d thought, oh sure, it’s his _boyfriend_ , in an acidic tone that took me aback. I’d wanted… I don’t know. To have Nightingale to myself, maybe, for a few minutes before I’d get permanently busy with Bev and… well… and all that.

“Oh god, I’m having a child,” I said out loud.

“I’m sure you’ll make a splendid parent,” Nightingale said, almost absentmindedly. His eyes were far away, probably resting on some distant, David-related memory. “Don’t forget to apply for paternal leave.” 

Apparently his new emotional approachability only extended so far.

* * *

By the time we got back to the Folly, Guleed had sent me the initial witness testimonials, but I would have to go talk to them all again anyway to check for magic. I decided to start right there at the theatre.

Rehearsals were already in full swing again when I walked in - I found that morbid but the show must go on, I suppose. I swung by Mr. Johnson in the janitorial office first. He was rather helpful in establishing a timeline for the evening: he made a round of the building before going home at about 8 pm, during which he crossed the night watchman, Mr. Singh. Apart from that, he was either in his office or performing maintenance duties in and around the building as-needed. Ms. Maxwell had died at about seven thirty. And sure, Guleed had already asked about this stuff, and included it in her e-mail to me, but it never hurt to ask again. At least one of the people here was holding something back, and sometimes people maintaining a lie got confused.

The cleaning lady reminded me of Varvara, but that was probably just her Russianness and didn’t necessarily have to mean something. While she had all sorts of delightful opinions on the actors, technicians, director, owner of the theatre and about everyone else working here, none of it was precisely helpful. “The place is going to the dumps,” she opined. “I have been cleaning here for five years and haven’t looked at a pay raise in three.”

I expressed my sympathies and, in a lowered voice, she told me, “I hear next year they’re going to put… the _Scottish_ play on.”

Not quite knowing what to do with that, I nodded and left her to her work.

Mr. Sheen, the director didn’t have much time for me, seeing as he was supervising the rehearsal. When I asked him to confirm the cleaning lady’s account of whether the establishment was struggling financially, he said something to the effect of, “Well, we’ve always muddled through. It’s an uncertain business, with the audience, predicting what will land is always a gamble.” When asked about Ms. Maxwell, he said it was a pity, and that she’d been a dependable employee, and not much more.

He seemed stressed, concerned. The opening night of their musical was soon. Perhaps people weren’t going to patronize an establishment where someone had been murdered, he said, like that was the most important thing here. When I went to interview the actress in her dressing room, she said “I play the character of Janet” before telling me her actual name. These people were weird, and not a type of weird I was privy to.

But let’s tell it in order. I knocked, went into the actress’s dressing room, and found none other than David Mellenby there drinking tea with her. They were seated next to the vanity that held all her stage makeup, drinking from mismatched cups, the actress thumbing through her role book as they talked, as though this was commonplace, as though David was even remotely supposed to be here.

“Hello,” he said when he saw me, his face lighting up in a genuine smile. “This is DC Grant, he’s very capable at his job,” he introduced me to the actress, all gallantry and outdated manners and breezing blithely past the fact that I had no bloody idea why he was here and it was likely to make my day substantially more complicated.

“And what… on earth… are you doing here?” I asked him.

“I thought it interesting to return here,” David said mildly, sipping green tea from a mug that bore the classic “You Don’t Have To Be Mad To Work Here, But It Helps!” slogan.

I took a deep breath, about ready to tell him that he absolutely should not have come, that he was in no way affiliated with this investigation, and that Nightingale would blow his fuse if he heard, and… I didn’t. I snapped my mouth shut again. Discussing this in front of one of the suspects would make both of us look bad, and that wasn’t something I was prepared to deal with.

So I simply also took a seat on the last free chair. “Alright,” I said.” _Great_. Now, I’d like to ask a few questions, just quickly.”

“I’ve been asked many questions by many policemen already,” the actress said. She had a quiet, melodic voice. “And they kind of need me at rehearsal.”

“I’ll just be a minute,” I replied. “And then I’m sure we’ll _all_ be out of your hair for now.”

The actress sighed. She was a thin white girl, late twenties I thought, who’d recently dyed her hair blonde, maybe for the role. Combined with her dark clothes, it had the effect of making her look a bit disfavorably pallid and drawn. “I guess go ahead.”

I got out my notebook and a ballpoint pen and tossed them at David. if he was going to hang around, he might as well take notes.

“How long have you been an actress here, Ms…?” There. Nice and general.

“I’m engaged for the year,” she replied. “I play the role of Janet. It’s the female lead.”

“Impressive,” I said, because she really seemed to want me to. “And your name was…?”

“Cora Watley, um, Cora Jane Watley.” She shifted a bit in her seat, clasping her tea cup with both hands. “But I already told DC Guleed, and then DCI Nightingale.”

This gave me pause, because I’d had no idea that Nightingale had been through here, but then David caught my eye and stealthily held up… Nightingale’s warrant card, and wiggled it at me by way of explanantion.

Un- _fucking_ -believable.

“I… okay.” I nodded at David, trying to send him a glare that silently communicated that we’d need to address this later. “As I said, Ms. Watley, just one or two more questions for the records.”

“What kinds of questions?” the actress asked. She seemed nervous, but trying to appear unflappable, but everyone here, down to the cleaning lady, seemed high-strung, what with their opening night coming up and the murder (and, yes, very much in that order of importance). Besides which, being a suspect in a criminal investigation is bound to unnerve most people. But did her nerves look like those of a guilty person, or simply like someone hoping not to get caught in the crossfire?

“For example, how well did you know Ms. Maxwell?” I asked.

The young woman shrugged. “Not too well. We’ve talked in passing. But she seemed… nice. Not the kind of person you’d murder, I’d think.”

“But she was… not well-liked here?” I tried.

“No, I do think she was. I don’t know, I’ve only been here for a year. But what gives you that idea?” 

I took another deep breath. It felt strange, and tasted strange too, like there was greasepaint coating my lips and tongue. Weird. Was that just the air in here? It smelled pervasively of stage makeup. “Well, nobody here I’ve talked to seemed very… affected by the murder. Was Ms. Maxwell unpopular, or did she keep to herself…?”

Ms. Watley laughed. “Oh, she did not keep to herself, no. I’m certain people _are_ affected. It just needs time to settle in, and with opening night so close, the place is a madhouse anyway. Even murder becomes just one more thing.”

I exchanged a look with David, who looked quizzically back. He was tugging at his cuffs again, even harder than usual. 

“Would you have noticed if Ms. Maxwell had done anything… unusual, lately?”

“Unusual how?” The actress asked. There was that feeling again, that strange taste on my tongue when I breathed. Now it was accompanied by a sensation like scratchy cloth on my skin, and a glare of too-warm light from overhead. Were these _vestigia?_ But then what was emanating them? “She had that weird hobby, I don’t know. Something about occultism, not really my thing at all. Do you mean that?”

I put on a neutral face that I hoped looked just like the one Nightingale always did. Gosh, but that glaring light was getting annoying. “Do I mean that?”

“It’s about the most unusual thing Deirdre had going on, I guess. I mean, I don’t know. Two months ago she said she was going to make a business of it, selling… palm readings or something to people online. No idea how that’s supposed to work.”

“This might be tangentially related. Did she ever… bring that hobby of hers into work in any way?”

Cora Watley crossed her arms. “What do you mean by that?”

What did I mean by that? It probably wasn’t the most intelligent way to find out about Ms. Maxwell’s fortune telling business and if it had led to her murder. But David being here irritated me, and these sensations or _vestigia_ that I couldn’t place irritated me, and… maybe it was time to get out of here. 

I said my bit, gestured to David to follow, and left the dressing room. We stood out in the hallway leading from the dressing rooms back out to the stage, facing each other.

“Why did we leave?” David asked.

“Why do you have Nightingale’s warrant card?” I rounded on him.

“Ah, yes, that. You know, I always dreamt of being Mr. Nightingale." Chuckling to himself, David pocketed it. "I took the liberty of removing it out of his jacket.” He didn’t look the least bit regretful of this. “I’m confident I’ll be able to replace it before he even notices it’s gone.”

“I’m… pretty sure that’s a crime,” I said.

David shrugged his shoulders. “I thank you for your discretion, then.”

“That’s not how the police works these days,” I said. “That’s not how I work. You can’t wave at me and make me go away. I’m not the help.”

David had looked like he was going to be rebellious, but now he visibly deflated. He averted his eyes, picking at his sleeve. “I am dearly sorry,” he admitted.

I sighed, willing my irritation to simmer down. “Just what are you doing?” I asked, more calmly. “Nightingale said you are to stay away from the investigation. He was very clear, and he was right. People don’t play detective and crack the code, normally.”

He lifted his chin, suddenly again defiant. “Thomas is not my Captain anymore. Where does he get off, anyway, thinking I’ll obey his every order?”

Was that what this was? Another way to passive-aggressively carry out their lovers’ spat? I already felt exhausted with this. “Look, the way I see it… Nightingale is coming around. You guys might be okay, why go on pissing him off more?”

Not really wanting to stand around waiting for his answer, I started making my way back out to the stage. David was keeping pace with me. “Ingratiating myself to Thomas is not my entire purpose, you know,” he said. “I am a scientist foremost. I can’t not investigate things. There is a conundrum here, and I must know. Knowledge is not gained by adhering to what others say, or by failing to take risks.”

I was tempted to remind him that this here was a real crime scene, not a Sherlock Holmes story with him in the titular role. What did end up coming out of my mouth was, “I heard that was the exact attitude that led you all to Ettersberg.”

As soon as I’d said it, I knew it might have been a bit too much. As I stepped out on stage where the actors and director had since ended their rehearsal and cleared out, I heard nothing but silence behind me and, then, a long, deep, guttural sigh.

“You’re _right_ ,” David said, drawing level with me - he was pressing his hands to his temples. “I’m doing all the same things that I did before. I’m slipping back into the same behaviors. Assuming I know better. How have I not learned from what happened?”

Well, what could I say to that?

“I just get so blinkered sometimes,” David continued. “I don’t know why. And Thomas…”

He sighed once more. “Thomas was always the golden boy with all the natural talent. Coasting by when others struggled. I just want to show him that I also can achieve greatly. That I can stand beside him as his _equal_ , not always one step behind playing catch-up. But Thomas never understood my efforts, my work. My research. And then I found friends at Weimar who were genuinely appreciative of my theories, but they took my work and made… well… of course, I told myself, Thomas couldn’t understand why I felt slighted. Why I felt hurt. But he simply looked at the way things were with clearer eyes. Of course 800 human lives were more important than my hurt.”

I gave him a strained smile. “You know what, it might do a great deal in your favor if you told him what you just told me.”

I took another step onto the stage. This environment was bringing back persistent little wisps of uncomfortable memories of the Punch case. Sure, this stage was a lot smaller and less glamorous than the one at the Royal Opera House. But… still. But surely this wasn’t Punch-related, right? We hadn’t heard of him since the incident with Chorley’s bell. I’d have to ask Les-

No.

No.

What the hell, brain? Really, still? After all this time? 

“These… weird _vestigia_ in here,” David said suddenly. “Do you feel them too?”

And I did feel them. For a fleeting moment, I felt in full force the glare of the stage lights, the bead of sweat running into my neck down into the collar of my costume, the theater makeup itchy on my face, the exhilaration coupled with stage fright and before me the murmur of the audience, waiting to be entranced, or disappointed, by me. 

I shook my head, and was myself again. “Yeah, it’s like… like an actor, ten seconds before their big scene, or whatever.”

“Hmm.” David tugged at his cuffs again.

“We should get out of here.”

* * *

“Why did we leave?” David asked again, as we were standing out in the street up front of the theatre again. Why indeed? I had felt… dazed, in there, I’d felt a need to leave the building. I was sure he had felt the same.

“I don’t know. But something was extremely strange about that crime scene.”

“We don’t know what we’re dealing with, so we’re… retreating?”

It had a militaristic air to it, ‘retreating’. He had probably intended that. “Let’s call it regrouping,” I said. “Besides, Nightingale was right. Our concern should be the magical object. Guess I’ll have to find whoever would know about a magical crystal ball around which murders happen.”

That was going to be a needle-in-a-haystack search. The exact kind of busy work everyone wishes they could delegate to someone lower on the chain of command. With the Folly’s command structure being as it was, unfortunately I was the person this type of work was delegated to.

David must have seen my displeasure with the situation, because he said, “You could let me do it.”

Really? Hadn’t we had that conversation about five minutes ago? I told him as such.

“Sure,” he said. “But I don’t have anything else to do. I’m going out of my mind with the amount of nothing I’m contributing. Please.”

So he was determined to keep on learning nothing from his experiences. Not exactly stellar practice. But was that really my problem?

“Look,” I said, “You’ll talk to Nightingale, okay?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I miss being a theater kid and hanging out in the props room so much you guys. I should've just committed and gone to acting school.


	8. Interlude: David

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> David time

“Talk to Nightingale,” Peter had said. Of course David was going to converse with Thomas, frequently and on all manner of subjects. The matter of the missing crystal ball, however... well, it couldn’t hurt for David to ask around in his spare time, and catch up with Thomas on the matter at his leisure. Perhaps when he already had something to show for his efforts. Oh, Thomas would be delighted. Certainly, he was going to try to hide it and insist on him following the rules and not interfering with investigations in the future, but beneath that, he’d be glad to have this task taken care of. Then he’d see that David could still make a valuable contribution to the modern Folly.

So, inferring that Peter didn’t want to be bothered looking for that crystal ball, David ventured out (with what he dearly hoped was Peter’s covert permission) to see if some of his old contacts from the demi-monde were still around. Certainly, he expected to find the demi-monde as much changed as everything else, but some people stuck around for a seemingly indefinite amount of time.

Oberon had apparently wed one of the new river daughters, acquired some children with her and was now hosting something called ‘art therapy’. Well, David had always loved to draw. He accepted the offer of an easel, canvas and paint and got to work.

“And I may choose what I draw?” he asked.

“Of course,” Oberon told him. “The aim of this procedure is for you to confront upon the canvas whatever you feel you must.”

David nodded.

Oberon’s place was spacious in a way that was not to David’s taste, but he claimed the minimalism was conductive to his creative process. There was coffee on for him - sweet and almost white with milk, the way he preferred it - and a plate of snacks (no obligation). The food was kosher, Oberon informed him. David hadn’t often been in a position to keep kosher (it had been unheard of at the old Folly, at Casterbrook everyone had received the same boarding school lunches, and during the war you ate what you could get) and thus couldn’t claim he had been afforded even the opportunity to miss it, but it was a nice touch.

“This looks as though you knew I would return here,” he said.

“I suspected it,” Oberon said smoothly. “Your return has made little waves already, and I assume it will only make larger ones.” Apparently the orisa Peter was involved with was a sister to Oberon’s wife, and thence the news had travelled.

“Are you glad to have me back, old friend?” David asked softly. He kept his eyes fixed on the canvas, where his sketch was coming along. It would be a simplistic little thing, compared to his usual work: his hand was quite out of practice after six years of handling his staff and rifle with nary any time for anything else.

He had kept a notebook tucked into his breast pocket, where some of the other men had carried bibles, quite worn by the end of the war. Beyond drafts for new spells, notes on troop movements and strategy, and idle thoughts of his scientific work that he had let his mind drift to during the lulls, there had been little sketches there, and snippets of poems. He had drawn most of the men in his unit at some point. His poems had been dilettantish, and they had shifted focus with the time: what had started out as paeans to sweet Phoebus Apollo, the boyish god of the eyes of sun, had turned, later, to the warlike deities. He had read one aloud once, one he’d deemed sufficiently disguised, and the lads had teased him for weeks about what a harridan of a girl he must have at home, that she must compare to Athena of strategy, while their Captain had watched on with a lopsided smile.

(”What happened to Apollo?” Thomas had asked later, when they’d been alone, the only ones awake during the first watch of the night.

“The war changed him,” David had replied.)

(He’d never shown Thomas the poems to Thanatos, the angel of death.)

“I am glad you ceased the abandonment of your post,” Oberon said. “I am glad you stopped hiding.”

“It was rather chosen for me,” David argued. “The abandonment as well as the return.”

Oberon gracefully nodded his assent. He was always rather graceful in his movement. David liked to look at him, had always rather. All the controlled strength to him, the fluid, natural elegance of him. Masculinity misted off him like a golden vapour. Perhaps he should ask... but no. A wife, children: potent obstacles to that sort of thing.

For some reason, he had to think of Peter for a second. He shrugged it off. If Thomas truly hadn’t figured that one out yet, well, what on earth was David to do? Perhaps it was best to let the young man be, and look for suitable candidates for some... little adventures later. Or perhaps he was being overly optimistic, seeing as Thomas still barely gave him the time of day.

“And what is it you seek here now?” Oberon asked. “Hopefully not to disappear again? Because I am unsure of whether I would lend my hand a second time.”

David shook his head. He had wanted to disappear so badly, then. Oberon had taken pity and helped him find someone who might assist in that, who would create for him a replica of a dead body - his dead body. Now, funny enough, it was the furthest thing from his mind.

“No more running,” David said. “I am assisting the Folly in an inquiry.”

“What is your capacity within the Folly now?” Oberon asked. “I hear tell from my wife that certain elements will want to know, and soon.”

David didn’t know what _certain elements_ meant, nor the answer to the question. “It is yet to be determined,” he said. “The Folly are looking for a dangerous magical object, that might have recently been sold to someone unaware. I don’t know my way around the demi-monde as well as I used to, my friend. With whom would I begin a search for such an object?”

Under David’s hands, the canvas began filling up with landscape. Not so simplistic after all, apparently. He couldn’t recall consciously deciding what to draw, but now he had already started, and it was going to take itself to some sort of conclusion. He had drawn the snow, the overcast sky, now for the leafless trees. He added the dark trunks, tall and imposing, and a clearing in the middle.

“I will outfit you with a list of names, and places to start,” Oberon said. “The goblin market has changed little since you last visited. The faces differ, but the customs remain.”

“That is heartening,” David replied. Satisfied with the look of his painted landscape, he started populating it. The dark shapes, so still in the snow, pitiful heaps of humanity, sunken now, vacated of their souls. A corpse, a carcass, where was the difference? The werewolf, writhing in the snow. Beaten but not yet knowing it.

“Mind where you step, though,” Oberon said. “The relationship of the demi-monde to the Isaacs has hardly grown any more cordial.”

David looked up from the canvas. “What happened?” he asked.

Oberon shrugged. His tight shirt left little to the imagination, and David watched the ripple of his muscles below the fabric with appreciation. “The Starling is working on doing things a new way, reaching out, establishing relations between the community and the Folly, but the Starling is... a recent phenomenon.”

“Pardon me. The... who now?”

“Peter Grant. Nightingale’s Starling. Some interesting ideas, that one.”

Peter Grant. David hummed thoughtfully. Peter was turning out to be a more interesting person by the day. New ideas. Peculiar methods. A man after David’s own heart, it seemed, and handsome too. And... _Nightingale’s Starling,_ really? Then he remembered the actual topic of conversation, and mentally walked himself a few steps back.

“What does Thomas say to that?” he asked.

“Not much.” Oberon rolled his shoulders. He was doing it on purpose, David was sure. “The Nightingale keeps to himself.”

There was something odd to that statement. David picked up a smaller brush, to finish off the contours of the werewolf in its death throes. “Hm? Strange. Thomas was always the social butterfly.”

Oberon gave him an expression somewhere between amusement and incredulity, which to David was entirely weird. “Is that so?”

“I can’t imagine Thomas never popped ‘round to mingle. Sure, he wouldn’t have before the war. But he is technically fae now, and it does seem like the kind of thing he’d do, barring any other society... no offense meant.”

Oberon shook his head. “The Nightingale can barely show his face in any demi-monde pubs without half the clientele fleeing through the back door. His arrival heralds emergency, and most likely combat. Nothing else. He’s not... widely trusted by anyone in my circles.”

“I don’t understand,” David said. His hand holding the paintbrush sped up a little. The outline of the soldier, the only one upright, bent over the werewolf, got a little messy, so he corrected himself. He had not forgotten this moment, even after there had started to be many like it. The bayonet affixed to the rifle, pointed forward and downward, soon to arch for the werewolf’s throat. The staff, too, strapped to his belt. And then, out of some inexplicable impulse, David gave him wings.

These were not the serene, down-feathered wings often featured in depictions of biblical angels. These wings were breaking out of the man’s shoulders in a way that should not be, wrong and painful and bloody and raw. At last, David took another paintbrush, dipped its stiff bristles into the scarlet paint and flicked it with his index finger against the canvas. A fine red mist.

“Are you finished?” Oberon asked.

David nodded.

“Well, let’s see your offering for today.” Oberon crossed the room to stand behind David, scrutinizing the painting.

“This is a scene that you witnessed?” he asked.

“Well, the wings are an embellishment,” David said, “but otherwise, yes.”

“Is this figure supposed to be you?”

“I don’t have wings.” David shook his head.

Oberon crossed his arms. He chortled. “Oh, but you do. False wings, of wax, and the foolish hope to boot.”

“I’m Icarus,” David surmised, “my hubris caused me to fly too close to the sun and I plummeted. Very on the nose, my friend.”

“Oh, not at all. You’re Daedalus. You made these wings, you gave them to him, and you are watching all you ever loved take a nosedive off a cliff, and you’re asking yourself what you have done.”

There wasn’t much David could say to that. He wondered where Oberon had received that information. He wondered how Oberon knew what he had done.

Oberon cocked his head and gestured again at the painting. “This is the Nightingale, then.”

“I do wish everyone would stop calling him that,” David said. “ _The Nightingale_ is a construct that served to maintain troop morale. I am told that over seventy years passed since then.”

“A blink of an eye to some of us,” Oberon stated. Of course, David thought, he was much older. But that wasn’t the _point_.

“The point is,” he said, “I want to know what happened. I want to know how almost eight decades went by and _this_...” He gestured at the painting. “...is still the reality.”

“Maybe,” Oberon said, “I am not the person to ask this question.”

* * *

It really was a nuisance, David reflected, to be without his own vehicle. In town, it would do, but not outside of it, and as far as he remembered, his new destination was quite a drive out. He had only been once or twice, but he was certain that, outfitted with the navigation device on his new phone, if he figured it out correctly, he might get there without much trouble. But the problem of the car remained.

Well, Thomas and himself had had an agreement, back in the day, to share everything they owned between them. What’s mine is also yours, it had run. They never reneged on that agreement, and David figured this was important enough to infringe upon Thomas’s Jaguar again. At least this time around, Peter couldn’t possibly get caught in the crossfire.

As he was leaving London, he switched the radio on. Modern music was something he hadn’t gotten around to discovering yet, but he expected it to be as changed from what he remembered as everything in this new age. What he got was a mellow-voiced man singing (he would only later learn that the song was about as old as the car he was driving),

_Try to see it my way Do I have to keep on talking till I can't go on? While you see it your way Run the risk of knowing that our love may soon be gone We can work it out We can work it out_

While the lyrics were a little bit somber at times, the melody was upbeat and had David humming and tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. It was repetitive and by the second iteration of the chorus he was singing along. His singing voice wasn’t anything to write home about, not at all like that of Thomas, but it raised his mood a few notches and that, he supposed, was rather nice to have.

The melody stuck, and still coursed through his mind when, hours later, he arrived at that strange little tower. He got out of the car and stretched his stiff limbs expansively before walking up and ringing the doorbell.

The door was opened by... oh boy!

The door was opened by, there was no other word for it, a fuzzy young woman. Owing to the rather warm weather, she was in shorts and a black-and-gold top of some sort that, David observed, cut off an inch or so above her navel. It was very plain to see, because of this, that the whole of her was covered in a fine golden fuzz, like... like the fur of a bee, if the hairs on a bee were indeed called that. A single tendril of a glamour beckoned, almost probing, testing the waters out of routine rather than genuine interest, telling of the taste of honey and the steady buzz of the swarm and a... _fuzzy_ embrace. As per usual with fae of the female persuasion, this left David largely unaffected.

“Yeah?” the young woman asked.

“I am looking for Hugh Oswald,” David said. “Does he still live here?”

“Sure, grandad still lives here,” the young woman replied. “Why, what do you want from him?”

Grandad. _Indeed_ , David thought. _Hugh always did ensure us rather too profusely that he was interested in beekeeping a_ normal _amount._

“I’m come from the Folly,” he said.

“Oh,” Hugh’s granddaughter said. “They have another guy now?”

“They’ve had me for a while, in fact. Long story.” For once picking up on his opposite’s reluctance, David said, “He will want to see me. I know him quite well, we served together.”

The young woman - just now it occurred to David that he hadn’t asked her name, was it awkward doing it now? - cocked her head in a deeply sceptical way. “But you’re _not_ the Nightingale.”

So she too knew that moniker. The Nightingale. David felt anger bubbling up within him. He took a deep breath to contain it. “No. But he is why I’m here.”

“I don’t know about this,” Hugh’s granddaughter said. “I don’t want to stress him out.”

“He will very much want to see me,” David insisted.

“I’ll go ask him if he’s up for it,” the young woman said, and slammed the door in David’s face.

David waited a minute that felt approximately like a thousand minutes, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet with pent-up energy, picking at his collar as always when he was agitated. He’d never known why very little other people tended to have these little nervous habits, but to him they seemed natural as breathing. One plucked at one’s clothes when one was nervous, and one flapped one’s hands at about chest-height when one was in extreme happiness. That was how feelings were appropriately expressed. Curtailing these expressions could feel grating to the point of extreme discomfort, so he had never put much effort in trying, even when people stared sometimes.

The door opened again, revealing the bee... woman. “He says you can come up.”

David nodded. “Splendid.” She waved him to come in, and in he went. Not much had changed from his vague recollection of Hugh’s weird tower. Some furniture had been replaced or positioned differently since, but it was still much the same place.

“Out back,” Hugh’s granddaughter waved a hand in the direction of the staircase. “He’s in the garden.”

“I know my way,” David said, and yet still she followed one step behind him. Should he ask her name now? He did not.

They stepped out into the garden and David registered the omnipresent buzz of the swarm, the many bee-friendly flower arrangements and fruit trees before he registered the old man in the wheelchair. “Hugh Oswald,” he said, “We’ve much to discuss.”

The old man made a startled sound and recoiled so violently he almost toppled his chair over. David winced in sympathy and started towards him hands raised, not sure what to do to help but needing to do something, but Hugh’s granddaughter beat him to it. She rushed to her grandfather’s side and steadied him, stroking his back soothingly, then turned her head to throw David a look of pure venom. For a moment, he felt a prickle down his arms, like the painful little stings of a myriad bees.

“See,” she exclaimed, “this is why I didn’t want to let you in here, moron!”

“Mellissa...” Hugh Oswald gasped. His voice sounded as frail as he looked, god, he looked wizened, he looked like he’d disintegrate into dust at a careful touch, this couldn’t be, this wasn’t Hugh, Hugh was twenty and strong and full of the brimming vigour of youth, Hugh wasn’t old, couldn’t be old, and David was beginning to tremble- “Mellissa, you see him too?”

“What?” Hugh’s granddaughter snapped. (Mellissa, she was Mellissa, that was her name.) “Of course I see him. The idiot! I had no idea he was going to scare you!”

“But...” Hugh raised a shaking hand, pointing in David’s direction. He had trouble catching his breath, and his other, gnarled hand clawed into the armrest of his chair as he gasped. “David Mellenby is buried.”

“No, Hugh,” David said softly. Oh, he was still trembling, he felt like he should faint, but he couldn’t now. “No, I’m quite alive. Please, we can sit together and I can explain.”

“Nope,” Mellissa said. “You’re leaving. Right the fuck now, or I’ll have the hive on you.”

The bees seemed to buzz louder. David began to retreat.

“Wait,” Hugh Oswald said, sitting up a little straighter with a small amount of struggle. “Wait, Mellissa, let him stay. I want to hear...”

“Grandad, I don’t think you should...”

“If he’s really here and not dead, I want to know why,” Hugh Oswald said, his voice a tad firmer now.

Mellissa seemed extremely reluctant to agree to this, but she relented. “I’ll be close by.” She glared at David one last time as she went back inside the tower. “You pull any shit at all and I’ll see you chased out, Mr. Folly.”

David could do nothing but nod.

He picked up the spare chair and sat across from the old man. When he looked into his face, he could just about see, beneath the fine net of wrinkles and the wisp of thin, white hair, the boy Hugh Oswald he had known. It sent a shiver down his spine. He hadn’t realized...

He hadn’t realized until that moment what ‘eighty years’ really meant. At times, it felt like he had simply been transported into a kind of fairyland, a place where up was down, being... the way he was was legalized and celebrated with parades, but his lover was determined to never let him near again. A dimension of opposites. But Hugh, here, like this, showed him plainly that it was the same world, although having turned times upon times without his active participation. Hugh Oswald had grown old in his absence, so very old it seemed a miracle he was upright still. How many survivors of Ettersberg had died in those long interim years, simply from a too-long life? How had David not thought to ask?

“Yes,” Hugh said, “it’s not looking too well, is it?”

It took David a second to realize he meant himself. “You look fine,” he muttered, drawing patterns on the tablecloth.

Hugh Oswald made a wheezing sound. David grew worried, but then realized it was laughter. “Still a miserable liar.”

“I’m not...!” David started, but was there any use in denying anything now? Hugh looked frail, and that was obvious enough.

Hugh waved it off. “Do tell, old friend,” he said, and while he was trying very hard to put a calm face on it, the tremor was still present in his voice, “what brings you here, back from the grave? I found your body...” His voice caught, and splintered on the last word, and for an endlessly, agonizingly long moment, he fought to maintain his composure.

David felt like dirt. What had he done to the boy? _How could you do this to Oswald_ , Thomas had asked him, a few days ago in that cave, and he had been right to ask.

“Never, in fact, in the grave.” In short, David summarized what had happened to him, his heedless flight into the countryside, the faerie he’d met, the long sleep. “I’m dearly sorry,” he said, something he seemed to be saying often these days, “of course I should’ve remembered that my sudden appearance would startle you. Only, I assumed Thomas had already told you I was back. You would’ve been the first to call, no?”

Hugh Oswald wheeze-laughed again. “Thomas? Hah! The Nightingale hasn’t spoken to me in over twenty years.”

David blinked.

David blinked again.

David blinked back to the year 1944, to Arnhem, Private Hugh Oswald’s first engagement. The boy had barely been of age. After the dust had settled, he had broken down weeping, and David had found him later cradled in Thomas’ arms, head resting on his shoulder, both hands clutching his Captain’s jacket, tears and snot leaving a growing stain on Thomas’ uniform. Thomas had shushed him, muttering that yes, he knew, yes, he understood. Oswald had become one of Thomas’ boys, a favorite, maybe. Thomas had always had a way of almost obessively mothering the youngest recruits. And David, of course, as Thomas’ lieutenant and partner (although no one would have known about that latter part, obviously) had, as a matter of course, shouldered his part of the weight.

They hadn’t talked for twenty years? Why? How?

“What happened?” he asked.

At this point, Mellissa came back out with a cup of tea which she placed in front of her grandfather, and nothing for David. David decided not to mind.

“What happened?” Oswald carefully took a miniscule sip of his tea, testing the temperature. “Time passed. I grew older. Thomas grew younger. It... pains him, I suppose, seeing me this way. It pains you right now.”

David waved it off. Yes, it... shocked him seeing Hugh like this. But that shock was his own thing to overcome. “People grow old. Surely Thomas is not so thin-skinned as to break contact with one of his closest friends over this alone.”

Oswald shrugged. “I don’t know what else it might have been. We used to meet fairly regularly up until the late sixties. I can’t recall exactly when, but he broke contact fairly shortly after the rejuvenation event. We didn’t see much of him after that.”

“Who else is still standing?” David inquired.

“Ah. Arkwright is still alive, Patterson, Simpkins, Gerald and Mercier - John, not Edwin, obviously. Giles the younger and Rooney, although he’s been having heart problems. Blaine and Gardiner. A few others. Thomas doesn’t talk to them, either.”

David began drumming his fingers on the tabletop. “Have you fellas asked him why? Has he ever explained himself?” It seemed impossible that Thomas should, for any reason, leave his ducklings behind. A world of opposites, again.

Hugh Oswald looked out at his garden. “We weren’t going to make demands of him. He’s... he’s the Nightingale.”

The flat of David’s hand hit the table so hard it smarted. “No!”

Oswald winced. “Wh- what...?”

“Perhaps Thomas stopped talking to you because you insist on doing this!”

“Doing... what?” Oswald cocked his head, confused at David’s sudden ire. Oh, yes, they all tended to forget he could be angry. Had always tended to forget that. Lieutenant Mellenby had always been the soft, pale shadow attached to Captain Nightingale, until they’d learned that he had been made Lieutenant for a reason, that he held ferocity within him rivalling, and sometimes surpassing, that of Thomas.

“ _The Nightingale._ You really kept that up all these years, hm? He is still going about his life like that, isn’t he! The war has been over for such a long time! How old are you now, Private Oswald, hm? You must be pushing a hundred. Did you lads have him carry you all on his shoulders for the entire duration? And then you did not even have the common civility to reach out and inquire whether he was struggling?”

Because Thomas was having troubles, as much was clear. David remembered the other night in the reading room in stark detail, remembered how something had been revealed to him there in its sudden vulnerability that he could not categorize.

“It was just his way. You don’t...” Oswald interrupted himself, but David could guess at the end of that sentence. _You don’t ask the Nightingale whether he’s struggling._ Goodness but he wanted to drop his head into his hands and stay like that for a while. Thomas had gotten that nickname when he’d joined the school choir. In this moment, David wanted very much to chuck a fireball at a few of Oswald’s pretty flower arrangements, and was almost thankful for the inhibitor cuffs.

“Well, you didn’t know him before the war like I did.” David sighed. And how indeed would Oswald know? He was much too young. “I see how it all changed him. And it’s not improved a bit, it seems, in all the years. He doesn’t seem to have one true friend in all the world. He secludes himself even from me, and I’m his lover.”

Oswald shifted in his seat. “You...?”

“You heard me right, his lover.” He didn’t originally come here to unload this on Hugh, but now that he’d started, he couldn’t seem to stop himself. It was allowed now, the law was on his side now, and there was nothing Hugh could do but sit and take it. “Do you understand me? We are as Orestes and Pylades, Achilles and Patroclus, we are as Wilde and Bosie Douglas, we are two Alan Turings. We are Friends of Mrs. King. We commit acts of buggery upon each other, and we do so extremely well. We-”

“I know what a gay man is, Davey, you can quiet down,” Hugh Oswald said with a tired wave of his hand. “Look, none of us knew this for certain about the two of you, but a fair few of us suspected. We thought it best not to pry at the time. What makes you tell me now?”

“I’m...” David rubbed his eyes. They stung a bit. “I’m telling you in part because I can, I suppose. And because I need to impart to you that Thomas is a man who bleeds red. He lost everything too, you know. He lost me, and that is my own shame to bear, but he would have needed a friend, and what he got appears to have been a gaggle of mouth-breathers chorusing ‘If the Nightingale can do it, so can I’. Yes, you lads needed something, too. But you went back here and lived out a life in peace, and Thomas has kept on fighting the war every second since. And you’re surprised he didn’t show at company reunions? You gave him notice of my ‘death’, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” Oswald gripped the edge of the table with both hands, attempting perhaps to keep his calm. “He sort of nodded, and dismissed me from the hospital room. ‘Thanks for telling me’, he said, ‘Dismissed, Private’. And he did that blank face of his. And that was it, that was all of it.”

David ran his hands across his face. He couldn’t begin to imagine how they both had to have been hurting. _I’m such a bloody idiot._ “This is a mess,” he groaned. “This is a mess and I’m not equipped to fix it.”

“Well, well.” Oswald patted his hand. “You’re back now, isn’t that enough?”

“No,” David said. “It’s too little too late. I fear we all broke Thomas, and there’s no unbreaking him.”

* * *

Back at the Folly, David parked the Jag, snuck in through the back door and collapsed on a couch in the drawing room. He felt drained. Driving from Herefordshire had taken a while. It was late, darkness was beginning to fall, and he was tired.

He felt more than saw Molly enter. When he turned and beheld her, she was carrying a tray with tea and small sandwiches. The small dog they had here now was following on her heel, hoping to catch a bite. David noticed just then that he had missed lunch and dinner, and he was quite hungry.

He gave Molly a small smile. “Oh, are these for me?”

Molly nodded, and set the tray down on a coffee table. The Folly was full of these rooms, David thought idly, rooms of artfully arranged armchairs and little tables, rooms that nobody now used. What a waste, what a tremendous waste. He took a sandwich. The dog - his collar said Toby - immediately begged, and David bent down and stroked his fur. _Good boy._

“I still don’t understand it, Molly,” he said. “I saw Oswald, but he gave me more questions than answers. Why were things permitted to get this way? Yes, Hugh is old now, and frail, but he had a life, in his way. He continued doing what he loved to do. He fucked a bee, somehow. Why was this not a possibility... here?”

Molly tilted her head to the side. The look in her eyes was... calculating, somehow. _Do you want to know?_ she seemed to be asking. _Can you bear the knowing?_

“I want to know anything anyone can tell me,” David told her. This was his penance. And more, he couldn’t stay his natural curiosity. He had to empty this cup to the bitter dregs.

She took a step forward, reached out her hands, and suddenly was _touching_ him. In all this time, she had never _touched_ him--

He blinked his eyes, and a brief bout of blackness enveloped him, and he was suddenly elsewhere. He was in his own bedroom. How had that happened? It was night, not dusk. He quickly cycled through, and dismissed, half a dozen hypotheses. He had certainly not sleepwalked, and Molly certainly hadn’t carried him here. This felt too strange to be any of those. And the room was different, clothes and books and magazines lying about that he didn’t own anymore and hadn’t in a long time. What...?

There was someone in his bed.

When David went closer to investigate, it felt like he was floating rather than walking. It took him a few seconds to identify Thomas there in his bed (where he had every right to be) because so much was different. This was not Thomas of present days, except if he’d fallen very grievously ill very quickly while David had been away. He was gaunt and sickly pale, messy, unwashed strands of his hair hanging into his face, his jaw littered with chestnut-coloured scruff. He was fully dressed, down to his combat boots, and clutching to his chest a piece of fabric - a jumper, one of David’s own old favorites.

He waved a hand in front of Thomas’s eyes and got no reaction. Just a vacant, empty stare fixed at the ceiling.

The door was cracked open, slowly, carefully, and Molly entered. She was carrying an empty laundry basket under her arm.

Oh, this had to be a _memory_ , David thought. A memory that Molly was now sharing with him. How fascinating. How did she do that? Had she always been able to do that?

Molly approached the bed and gestured with her free hand in the vague direction of it. No reaction came from Thomas. He seemed catatonic, wholly somewhere else, or maybe nowhere at all.

Molly hitched the laundry basket higher up her hip. Still no reaction.

She gestured again, perhaps a bit frustratedly. When there was still no movement in response to this, she bent down and carefully, with the very tips of her fingers, reached for the jumper in Thomas’ hands.

“No!”

Immediately, Thomas snapped to, curling protectively around the bit of fabric. One of his hands twitched and his shield came up, with the same intensity as on the battlefield, with a _whoomph_ of raw energy that, as always, even just in this second-hand memory, felt like it made David’s teeth rattle.

Molly threw up a hand almost in exasperation, and gestured again at the bedsheets, the jumper - a cream-coloured one - then at her laundry basket.

“No... no. You can’t... can’t.” Thomas looked up at her out of wild, red-rimmed eyes. His voice sounded like he’d screamed it hoarse. David thought of his boyfriend as he’d met him, with that easy grin and the sun on his face, thought too of his revered Captain, sure as a rock in every crisis, a force of nature when unfettered on the battlefield. This iteration of Thomas looked feral.

“It smells like him,” Thomas muttered. “It does, still, a bit. Nothing else does anymore.”

Molly shook her head, enveloped by deep pity.

“Do you understand, nothing else... Molly...” He began rocking himself back and forth, cradling David’s jumper to his chest like a mother her baby, like a child a favorite doll. “Please don’t take... please, please don’t make me...”

Thomas Nightingale, _pleading_.

Molly stepped back, and the shield broke apart, and Thomas buried his face in the cream-colored wool, and David could hear his flat, hitched sobs, like they were being torn out of him, and he wished to never have been born to cause such grief.

Beyond the window, the light changed. It changed rapidly, light and dark and light again, and David watched as Thomas remained still and unmoving on the bed, barely changing position, watched in fast-forward as his hair and beard grew, as he got ever thinner, as Molly came and went and tried and more often than not failed to force some food upon him, and the days turned to weeks turned to months--

“Stop,” he cried, “Stop, Molly, stop, I can’t see any more!”

Seemingly Molly had heard him and was complying, as David felt a huge, yanking tug and was back in the drawing room, breathing heavily and slightly nauseous and... still... holding a sandwich. He put it down for Toby. He wasn’t hungry now.

“Damn,” David said. He pulled up his knees and wrapped his arms around them, not caring if it didn’t look proper, there was no one here but Molly to witness it. “Was it like that all of the time?”

Molly vaguely waved a hand.

“But it’s better now. It _is_ better now.”

Molly shrugged. She had always been able to communicate much with sparse gestures. She then lowered her hands, and looked at the floor.

“Listen, don’t you think that. You’ve done more than enough, I’m sure. You’ve given your all. You still do, don’t you?”

There was some movement at the door, and David looked up to see the second fae had appeared, the new one - Foxglove. Molly’s... sister?

She moved - in that gliding way the high fae moved - closer to Molly and opened her arms. Molly stood still as a statue for a second, then she accepted the comfort, hugging her sister, resting her head on Foxglove’s shoulder. Even amidst all the misery, David’s heart felt a flush of that comfort, too.

_This is good to see,_ he thought. And he knew what he had to do next.

* * *

The light was still on in Thomas’ bedroom, pouring out under the door in a warm, golden sheen, so David knocked and then let himself inside.

Thomas hadn’t undressed for bed yet; he was seated at his desk, pen in hand, finally correcting Peter’s homework. It was good to see him, not whole by a long shot, but at the very least not driven frenzied by grief.

Thomas put his pen down. “What is it, David? Come to apologize for disappearing with the Jag a _second_ time?”

“I’m sorry,” David said. He couldn’t bear to look at Thomas’s face and see that cold disapproval there now, so he hung his head, and scrutinized the carpet.

“You do realize you _cannot_ just go off like that?” There was a small scraping sound as Thomas pushed his chair back and stood.

“What’s yours is mine,” David muttered. “What’s mine is yours.” He felt so very tired.

He felt the sigh more than he heard it. He knew without looking up that Thomas was rolling his eyes now. “Look, certainly it annoys me that you keep spiriting my car away, but there is more to this than me feeling territorial about my property. I didn’t know where you were all day. You only recently got back. We’ve not gauged yet how deeply you’re affected by what you’ve experienced, you might endanger yourself going off alone, you might be volatile...”

And now Thomas was stood before him, and David felt his hands resting on his shoulders - Thomas had such beautiful hands, fine and graceful, he had always loved them - cupping his face, combing through his hair, like Thomas was reassuring himself that David was really here. Searching. David laughed.

“ _I_ might be volatile? I? Me?”

“You’re something, that’s for sure.” A hand lifted his chin, gentle but unyielding. “Look at me, Davey. What’s going on?”

And David met those clear, grey eyes and something in him bubbled over. He threw his arms around Thomas with abandon, and pulled him close, and held him there. “Oh, Thomas. Oh, _Thomas_.”

A hand was carding through his hair, and it felt so good after the day he’d had. “David...”

“I went to see Oswald.”

Thomas’ hands withdrew, and he took a step back, disentangling them again. “You...?” For a moment, something flashed in his eyes, and was suppressed too quickly for David to decipher. “How was he?”

“He was old... very old. His granddaughter is a bee. But Thomas, I understand now. I understand it all.”

David laughed again. His head spun. “I understand why you are this way now. And you’re not mad at me because I ran away, you don’t even bear a grudge against me because of Ettersberg. Or perhaps you do, but that’s hardly the point, is it? You’re not angry, you’re scared.”

And there it was again, something flashing in the depths of those grey eyes, a flicker of uncertainty, ruthlessly smothered. “I beg your pardon,” Thomas said.

“For all these years you’ve had to go it alone,” David replied. He felt fevered in that way that resembled emerging from a week-long series of gruelling and time-intensive experiments crowned at last by success. How everything fit together so smoothly at last! Hypothesis, experiment, conclusion. “Letting no one close was where your salvation lay. You stopped contacting the lads because they couldn’t see that you were struggling with them starting to age past you. That you _felt_ some sort of way about it. You’ve been Hugh’s Greek hero for so long. You don’t know _how_ to step off that plinth and be human again. You have reason to fear that it will get bad... very bad, if you try it.”

David grinned, and seized Thomas by the lapels, and would have picked him up and spun him around the room if he didn’t feel so light-headed, so very drunk on the exhilaration of everything coming together at last. “But that’s all right now, my sweet songbird. I’m here! I will take good care of you. I understand you, fully. You’ve had to build these walls, but me going past them is a good thing. You can finally put that all down - that sword and shield, all down and away. And I will stand guard. Won’t that be good?”

Thomas tore himself away.

The exhilaration shrivelled, all joy in David took a fatal plunge at the cold rage in Thomas’ face.

“Lieutenant Mellenby,” Thomas said quietly (oh, he never raised his voice when he got angry anymore, he grew quieter), “What the _fuck_ did you just say to me right now?”

David felt tears threatening to spill at last. He was no longer light. He was miserable and anchored to this carpet, his body a lead weight. “Thomas...”

“You have no right. No right at all. How dare you? How... _dare_ you? After Ettersberg? After all you’ve caused to happen?”

“I only meant...”

“There’s the door. Leave now, before I start throwing fireballs.”


End file.
